What Do College-Football Fans Today Want?
New data is contradicting old theories about why student attendance is plummeting; cellphone service doesn’t matter, restrooms do
Ben Cohen WSJ.com July 16, 2015
The most powerful people in college football are desperate to figure out what the millennials on their campuses actually want.
They thought they knew. To stop the puzzling decline of student attendance at football games, schools across the country have taken numerous steps in recent years. The most radical was upgrading cellular reception and installing wireless networks around their stadiums—a multimillion-dollar endeavor for a service that may only be used a handful of times each year.
Now, though, schools have more data than ever on their fans and especially their student fans. That new information has them rewriting their old theories. Their most startling finding challenges the one thing they thought they knew about today’s 18-to-22-year-olds: It turns out that students may not want to be on their phones all game long.
The most recent support for this surprising result comes from a new survey by the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators and Oregon’s sports marketing center. It asked almost 24,000 students across the country to rank the factors that influenced their decision to attend games. By far the most important was a student’s interest in that sport. By far the least important was a stadium’s cellular reception or wireless capability.
The study is so counterintuitive that it seems like it must be an outlier—except that it is supported by similar polls in places where college football is massively popular.
At Michigan, when the student government asked undergraduates why they go to football games, what they found clashed with conventional wisdom: Michigan’s students simply didn’t care that much about mobile connectivity. In-game Wi-Fi wasn’t as essential as lower ticket prices or better seat locations. Among the seven possible improvements to the game-day experience, in fact, students ranked cell reception last.
The Southeastern Conference, which led all leagues in average attendance last season, has come to the same conclusion. “Our data tells us that the most important things for fans coming to the game are parking, restrooms and concessions,” Mississippi State athletic director Scott Stricklin said.
The questions of what it’s like to attend a live sporting event and how it could be more enjoyable are nothing short of existential issues in sports. But nowhere are they trickier to answer—and nowhere is there more at stake—than in college football.
A college-football game is an event unlike any other in U.S. sports. Most major-college teams play just six to eight home games a season, some of which aren’t even against teams on their same level. Almost all of those games are on Saturday afternoons, not on weekday nights or during work hours, and the people in their stadiums are wildly diverse. Schools must cater to both 18-year-old undergraduates and 81-year-old donors—and those opposites happen to be the lifeblood of an athletic department.
The epidemic of student absences has troubled school administrators because of its potential implications for the future of college football and fundraising. Before last season, average student attendance at college-football games was down 7.1% since 2009, according to a Wall Street Journal study of stadium turnstile records.
Schools that had been slow to recognize the sea change were suddenly scrambling to respond. They overhauled their student-ticket packages. They started selling alcohol in on-campus stadiums. They shelled out millions of dollars to solve the technological puzzle of packing 100,000 people into a confined space and praying their smartphones still work.
They also decided they didn’t know enough about their fans. Schools have since embarked on a sweeping effort to collect more information about the people who come to football games—and that is shaping the way they overhaul the experience.
“We have had access to data,” Boston College athletic director Brad Bates said. “I think in the last five to 10 years we’ve taken it much more seriously.
One of the shocking things that schools have learned is that football fans, including students, currently care more about clean restrooms than fast Internet. In the recently released Oregon study, which surveyed students across all five power conferences, fans ranked cellular connectivity last on their wish list.
“The nuts and bolts,” Stricklin said. “They still want the basics.”
Today’s fans seem interested in the same amenities that have always interested football fans. At Ole Miss, one of the first schools to survey its supporters, Rebels fans said before last season that mobile web, apps and email access were the three least important of 53 elements of a live game, according to the school’s summary of the study. Last year, though, Ole Miss installed a new wireless network in its football stadium for about $5 million, in part because students said cellular reception was a priority, athletic director Ross Bjork said.
“I don’t think it’s on the forefront of the broad fan base yet,” he said. “The key is preparing for the future. We know this is going to be a part of the fan experience, and we know fans will continue to evolve.”
Some schools are still weighing whether it is worth the cost. Estimates for wireless installation can exceed $7 million, and athletic departments fear it may not offer an immediate financial return on the investment, said Baylor infrastructure executive Bob Hartland.
The opening of Baylor’s McLane Stadium last season was the first time a Southern school in a major football conference moved into a new venue since the invention of the World Wide Web. Overall, the project cost more than $250 million, including $2 million for a new wireless network that was accessed by about 33% of the crowd in an average game. School officials felt they didn’t have any other option.
“I believe Internet access is just expected,” Hartland said.
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