NCAA, we have a problem: Student attendance tanking at football games

ATLANTA — While his shirtless, breathless friends hollered and sweated at Bobby Dodd Stadium in Atlanta during Georgia Tech’s recent victory over Georgia Southern, Chris Weis was hustling through the Tech campus to a study session. He is a third-year electrical engineering major, and watching football is not a priority for him as it is for some other students. He will go to some games this season but not this game and not with tests looming in the week ahead.

“It’s not a distaste for the sport,” he said. “It’s four tests. You talk to any of the people walking around here right now. If they are not at the game, it’s because of academics.”

He holds up his hand and said, “Hey, I gotta go. Sorry.”

Then there is Eric Hill, a student at Georgia State. He may love football. But he hates the idea of racking up debt. So he works a retail job on Saturdays. The Panthers will have to manage without one of their biggest fans in attendance.

“I pay for my own school,” he said, sitting in the student center on a Saturday morning. “I want to go to the game, but I’m paying for this. I have to work. The idea of a student loan after college scares me.”

Weis and Hill are not alone in not watching their college’s top sport. Student attendance at college football games is down 7.1 percent since 2009, according to a study by The Wall Street Journal published Aug. 27 — though you might not know it by television screen pans of fans with painted faces screaming at the top of their lungs from the student sections. TV has a wonderful way of keeping the camera shots tight on throngs of students and away from empty seats, lest the general public get the idea some people really don’t care about the game.

But it is not that the students care less about the teams than they did before. They have spirit. However, they are concerned about doing well academically, hunting for still scarce jobs and the spiraling cost of being an active sports fan. There are lots of tugs on their time and wallets. “You walk into a stadium, and you are automatically going to start paying higher prices for things,” said Georgia State student Sean Grant, a visual arts major.

Georgia State students pay for the school’s football program through their student fees, and it is not really the price of the ticket that keeps Grant away. It’s the price of everything else in the Georgia Dome. He waved his hand out toward the street. “This is Atlanta. There are all kinds of art festivals here. There is a lot of recreation … I like to do things a little cheaper — you know, take friends to the crib or to a bar with reasonably priced beer.”

But college football teams need cheering students. They are the loudest and most boisterous fans in a stadium. Devoted students provide the foundation for home field advantage. Players will tell you their adrenaline spikes with the roar of a raging crowd. But being a spectator now costs a lot of cold, hard cash. At Georgia Tech, a full-time student pays $49 for season tickets, or six home games. There are 6,000 seats reserved for students in 55,000-seat Bobby Dodd Stadium. Tech’s undergraduate enrollment was 14,588 in 2013.

Driving some of the changes in the game is the power of television. TV coverage has boosted profiles and profits but also made the games longer because of long television breaks. “When you are at the game, it feels like you are there a long time, as opposed to when you are watching it on TV,” said Kehinde Alonge, a third-year civil engineering major from South Florida.

But TV revenue is responsible for the soaring salaries for coaches and administrators and new facilities, so television calls the shots as far as commercial breaks go. It also means students are sometimes pushed out of quality seats and put elsewhere to sell those seats to more moneyed boosters.

Alonge was sitting at a bus stop on campus with his friend Sanae Alaoui when he hit on something that administrators might not easily admit. As college football has become more popular nationally and television money increases the pressure on coaches to win, there are more time demands on student-athletes. Their schedules are mapped out ,and they often spend 40 hours a week on football, counting practice, conditioning and studying tape before a game.

“They have their own dining hall. It is like they are in their own bubble,” Alonge said. “That’s the case for a lot of athletes, not just football. Maybe that is a factor for some students on why they don’t go to games. They don’t connect with the athletes.”

But another factor might be a little more timeless. Some students look at college as a four-year experience to be enjoyed. Others look at it as the foundation for the next 40 years and pour most of their energy into their studies — especially considering the ever-increasing debt load that students are expected to take on.

One student hurried by and couldn’t stop to talk. He had a study session with other students in chemical engineering. Meanwhile, Hill, the Georgia State student who works on Saturdays, said schools should ask themselves a big question when it comes to declining attendance.

“Does the rise in school costs correlate with this slight decrease in attendance?” he asked, given that tuition rates and fees for the 2012–13 academic year increased by 4.5 percent over the previous year. “It does for me. I know a lot of people going to work on Saturday mornings. I have friends who work two jobs so they don’t have to deal with loans.”