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Football Season Tickets Sold Out - stupac2 - 07-23-2013

Here's the Go Stanford article: http://www.gostanford.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=30600&ATCLID=208780560

I can't honestly say that I expected that to happen. Yeah, we just won the Rose Bowl, but I wouldn't have guessed that counted for more than having Luck return in 2011. I'm definitely excited to have a packed house, hopefully the Ducks and Domers are relegated to the upper decks this year.

Oh, and there's also a bit in there about smartphone tickets, which sounds awesome to me. I kept my tickets in the glovebox to minimize the chances of disaster, but having that as a backup would be great.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - stan01 - 07-24-2013

I just hope the season ticket holders will actually attend every game.  I want "sold out" to look like sold out.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - washingtonismoney - 07-24-2013

(07-24-2013, 11:48 AM)garvin link Wrote:I wonder how this affects scalpers?

A lot! They are not happy.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - stupac2 - 07-24-2013

According to that story we allot 5k tickets to undergrads, out of a population of 7k (according to wikipedia, and wow has that grown since just a few years ago, it was 5.5k when I started). Do we really get 5/7 undergrads into the stadium? Presumably some grad students go, but I'd imagine the interest is much lower among them.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - JohnR34231 - 07-24-2013

Wonder if we will ever have any games in the '49ers new stadium. Would be kinda fun if we did.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - yvonne - 07-24-2013

The Bill Walsh Legacy Game (SJSU) would be a good candidate.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - TreeWeird - 07-24-2013

(07-24-2013, 12:41 PM)stupac2 link Wrote:According to that story we allot 5k tickets to undergrads, out of a population of 7k (according to wikipedia, and wow has that grown since just a few years ago, it was 5.5k when I started). Do we really get 5/7 undergrads into the stadium? Presumably some grad students go, but I'd imagine the interest is much lower among them.

Not just undergrads.  Grad students also qualify.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - yvonne - 07-24-2013

I don't know where this idea that Stanford grad students are a bunch of eggheads that don't watch football games came from. I lived in a mixed house (soph through grad students) and plenty of the house members went to games. They weren't any different from other house members. My classmates, who lived in grad only housing also went to games. I don't think my classmates who lived off campus or some of the foreign students did, but there's still a good number of grad students who follow Stanford football.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - stupac2 - 07-24-2013

(07-24-2013, 03:45 PM)Yvonne link Wrote:I don't know where this idea that Stanford grad students are a bunch of eggheads that don't watch football games came from. I lived in a mixed house (soph through grad students) and plenty of the house members went to games. They weren't any different from other house members. My classmates, who lived in grad only housing also went to games. I don't think my classmates who lived off campus or some of the foreign students did, but there's still a good number of grad students who follow Stanford football.

Well, for starters you're drastically misrepresenting what I said, which was "Presumably some grad students go, but I'd imagine the interest is much lower among them." That statement is perfectly consistent with your andecdotes.

But to answer your question anyway, I've always been given the impression that grad students are less engaged in general. Remember that your anecdotes don't really mean anything; of course some go, but obviously most don't, if they did they'd be the majority of the students section. I think that the brobdingnagian disparity in nationality (33% vs 7% foreign-born) matters a lot when you're talking about a sport with tiny international appeal, and is responsible for a large part of the general impression.


On a different topic, I don't want a game at the new Niners stadium. I think college games belong on college campuses. Maybe I'm crazy, though.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - washingtonismoney - 07-24-2013

We may pick up some fans from undergrads that don't have much in the way of sports -- say some liberal arts school like Oberlin or Swarthmore or something.

But yeah, in general in all my days of going to Stanford games, I can only remember a very few who were grad students.

Eggheads unite! - jacketree - 07-24-2013

I was an undergrad in the crucible of Southern Football (and that is capitalized!), even if our team sucked half the time. Road trips were simply a part of the experience. One went to every home game and as many road games as one could afford (time and money - money being more important). So after hitting any number of college stadiums in the back seat of a Greyhound Bus rolling down Highway 41 (Atlanta, Athens, Gainesville, Knoxville, Charlottesville, Auburn, Birmingham [for the upset of the millennium - my first college game as a student], Winston-Salem, Raleigh, Chapel Thrill, New Orleans, etc.) I just assumed you bought student tickets (although they were free at GT - $10 for an annual date pass) and went to games.  I even worried they would run out.  (Ha ha)

I gravitated to a group of engineering students also from ACC/SEC land (with one dude from Villanova who now is a Real Admiral in the Navy and runs the Seabees). We went to games like real football fans. It was different. Not quite used to beach balls, people watching in lieu of foaming at the mouth football watchin', and the game not being more important than life itself. (Although the importance of football games at 1-10, 6-5, 3-8, 6-4-1 GT was somewhere below grades, girls and grilled cheese.) Not to mention open containers of alcohol rather than flasks of bourbon hidden somewhere on your date.  Still, had a blast. I think the best game was when Rice actually beat Texas and word spread to the two Rice alumnae we hung with at games. I think Stanford probably lost that day (as they did most days) but the after party was awesome that night.

You do hold on to your UG allegiance. Half the point of going to Stanford games was to hear scores from across the country announced (no smart phone to check) and give your buddies a hard time about it. Or vice versa.  Strangely, we didn't know anyone from Slippery Rock.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - CompSci87 - 07-25-2013

An anecdote on the other side of the scale: I went to Marquette as an undergrad, which does not have a football team, but is strong in basketball. They won the national championship during my last year of high school and were still strong while I was in college there, and I went to a fair number of games with friends. As to football, I was a Packer fan, but only watched them on TV.

When I got to Stanford I thought vaguely about attending some basketball games, especially once when I heard Stanford was going to play Marquette, but was totally caught up in academics and never did. My first Stanford sporting event was a football game that I went to (in my 5th year) because a friend of mine who was a law student organized a group outing. I don't know of anyone else in my department (Computer Science) who was interested in Stanford sports either, though I did know one master's student who played women's rugby.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - Bruce Wang - 07-25-2013

I've noticed a pattern among my sports fan friends that went to non-FBS schools for undergrad and Stanford for grad school.  They are into Stanford sports if the MBB or the football team was good during their time on campus.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - jayasena - 07-26-2013

(07-24-2013, 04:12 PM)stupac2 link Wrote:But to answer your question anyway, I've always been given the impression that grad students are less engaged in general. Remember that your anecdotes don't really mean anything; of course some go, but obviously most don't, if they did they'd be the majority of the students section. I think that the brobdingnagian disparity in nationality (33% vs 7% foreign-born) matters a lot when you're talking about a sport with tiny international appeal, and is responsible for a large part of the general impression.

I don't disagree that most grad students probably don't get as engaged as undergrads but the foreign nationality thing isn't an insurmountable barrier. I arrived in the US when I started undergrad at USC and was a season ticket holder by my sophomore year. And we had a big group who attended every home game together, a majority of whom were international students. Most of us could no longer conveniently follow our home teams (time zone differences, limited TV coverage etc.) and football filled that void. We had Mexicans, Indians, Italians, Sri Lankans, Germans, Brazilians, Pakistanis and folks from a few other countries in that group. My point is that given the right level of interest and engagement from the larger university community, a good fraction of the international students could be "assimilated" quite easily. USC had an environment that was conducive to that. And interest in Stanford football is probably as high as it's been in recent times. Hopefully that's helping engage more of the international students.

And to Garvin's point, I'm now a much bigger Stanford fan than I am an SC fan (and have been for quite a while, starting from well before the recent resurgence in the program). I may well be in the minority in that sense but "dual fan" grad students aren't that rare. We had people in our research group with undergrad degrees from places like Michigan and Washington who were still die-hard fans of those schools but also attended Stanford games regularly.

I think the bigger factor is whether you are a sports fan at all or not. Anecdotally, to me, Stanford seemed to have a significant fraction of the student body who just didn't care about sports at all.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - yvonne - 07-26-2013

Maybe. Although my undergrad school will play in the Big East through this season, it played what would now be FCS schools (Bucknell, Colgate, a couple of Ivies) in my era with only two games per year against what would now be called FBS schools (Penn State and a service academy). Come to think of it, the grad students in my house who went to games did their undergrad at places like Cornell. On a similar note, however undergrads from big football states would often wear shirts from the local state university. People often have their "other" team, even in pro sports.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - yvonne - 07-26-2013

(07-26-2013, 06:53 AM)somnambule link Wrote:[quote author=stupac2 link=topic=8132.msg64723#msg64723 date=1374707521]
But to answer your question anyway, I've always been given the impression that grad students are less engaged in general. Remember that your anecdotes don't really mean anything; of course some go, but obviously most don't, if they did they'd be the majority of the students section. I think that the brobdingnagian disparity in nationality (33% vs 7% foreign-born) matters a lot when you're talking about a sport with tiny international appeal, and is responsible for a large part of the general impression.

I don't disagree that most grad students probably don't get as engaged as undergrads but the foreign nationality thing isn't an insurmountable barrier. I arrived in the US when I started undergrad at USC and was a season ticket holder by my sophomore year. And we had a big group who attended every home game together, a majority of whom were international students. Most of us could no longer conveniently follow our home teams (time zone differences, limited TV coverage etc.) and football filled that void. We had Mexicans, Indians, Italians, Sri Lankans, Germans, Brazilians, Pakistanis and folks from a few other countries in that group. My point is that given the right level of interest and engagement from the larger university community, a good fraction of the international students could be "assimilated" quite easily. USC had an environment that was conducive to that. And interest in Stanford football is probably as high as it's been in recent times. Hopefully that's helping engage more of the international students.

And to Garvin's point, I'm now a much bigger Stanford fan than I am an SC fan (and have been for quite a while, starting from well before the recent resurgence in the program). I may well be in the minority in that sense but "dual fan" grad students aren't that rare. We had people in our research group with undergrad degrees from places like Michigan and Washington who were still die-hard fans of those schools but also attended Stanford games regularly.

I think the bigger factor is whether you are a sports fan at all or not. Anecdotally, to me, Stanford seemed to have a significant fraction of the student body who just didn't care about sports at all.
[/quote]

People form all sorts of attachments at school. International students come to school with the idea of tasting the new cultural "flavors" of the country they're visiting. Part of that is sports. If colleagues bring them to games, they have every chance of becoming an avid sports fan as any other student. I have anecdotes of that, as well. Age probably also plays a role. Grad students by and large are still in their 20s and are still forming new attachments.

The key, as somnambule says, is building engagement with grad students, rather than writing them off. It's easiest to do with students who live in on campus, just as it is with undergrads.

Marketing would be wise not to dismiss 60 percent of the student base. They may engage at a lower rate, but they're still potential fans/customers. You add up enough individual cases, and pretty soon, you get a trend.  ;)

Other fan bases don't dismiss their grad students. Head over to the 59er Insider, and you'll find many usernames that begin with "Haas" and a few that begin with "Boalt." At Texas A&M, grad students and seniors are given the same ticket buying priority, ahead of underclassmen.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - washingtonismoney - 07-26-2013

Lost in the snark/animadversion about the UCLA champ game turnout was that, I believe, about 6k students showed up. I doubt they were all undergrad.

Re: Football Season Tickets Sold Out - stan01 - 07-26-2013

My grad student friends with other powerhouse affiliations did not claim Stanford allegiance back then, but they do now, if Facebook is any indication.  Success makes it hard to resist.