[jacket3ree]

That’s kind of a non-sequitor.  If it were just the size of the metropolis near a team then Columbia should have the highest attendance in college football.  Alas, there is very little evidence that having a nearby large city has any impact on attendance.

I’m going to twist the knife a little bit but this example is illustrative.  Georgia Tech, sitting in Atlanta, a metro area with 6.3 million inhabitants, averaged 38,200 fans in 2024.  The university of Georgia, sitting in a metro area with 215,000 people (1/30 the size of Atlanta) had an average attendance of 93,000, over twice that of Georgia Tech.

Being in a large metro area is neither necessary nor sufficient to engender high attendance.  It might even be a barrier, since large metro areas have a host of competing cultural activities, not the least of which are professional sports teams.

BC

Then we should just quit, right?  I asked how do you get those people into Stanford football. Just real crowds of 30,000 instead of 10 or 15 thousand. There are more then enough to chose from - it's not like Stanford is a crappy program out in the middle of Imperial County. It's a crappy program sitting near the border of populous San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. Assuming Stanford can win and be entertaining (big assumptions), how do you get people back, or better yet, generate new fans? Ones that are willing to drive through more than 20 minutes of traffic.*

Point well taken on UGA vs. GT attendance. Although to separate Athens from Atlanta as potential locations for fans isn't really right. They are an hour apart and Atlanta is a major job center with plenty of UGA graduates. Athens' two largest employers are UGA (11,500) and Piedmont Regional Hospital (3,300). Atlanta (Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell MSA) has an estimated 3.1 million jobs. There are far more UGA fans in Atlanta than Athens. Tech is swimming upstream in a way Stanford can't fathom.

Back in the day, GT in the heart of big City Atlanta was a bigger draw than UGA, in its bowels of hell (except for the future of cool college bands) location in terms of attendance and being a premiere Southern program despite having a niche curriculum and fewer students and alumni. Tech was a hot ticket in Atlanta when my dad was there in the 1950s. Tech left the SEC in 1964, integration happened, Tech's annual fortunes slowly waned until crashing at the end of the 70s, UGA's fortunes waxed, Dooley and then Herschel came, and everything switched. Check out attendance when the proverbial worm turned in the 1960s. Sanford Stadium had a major expansion in 1967:

1964.....Grant Field 47,395 per game.....Sanford Stadium 38,600 per game
1965.....Grant Field 47,375 per game.....Sanford Stadium 44,578 per game
1966.....Grant Field 44,578 per game.....Sanford Stadium 46,163 per game

They both draw from the same basic urban population and there was a cultural shift. Far more people from Rome or Savannah or Macon or Columbus would now drive to Athens rather than Atlanta to pack Sanford and act like the idiots they are. I wish we could draw more of the idiots honestly. That said, Bobby Dodd was packed for Clemson without that much orange and packed for Syracuse with hardly any orange and filled to the gunwales against Pitt with the CFP on the line, which is why it was so disappointing they crapped the bed right out of the gate. Still, reports are that it was electric and people will be back. Longtime fans said they had goosebumps as Tech mounted its comeback. Good old (really old even) days goosebumps. Even the neutral site Mercedes Benz game against Georgia with red seats was reported to be at least half Tech fans. Stanford isn't that different than Tech in terms of the types of students attending. So why can Tech games be a draw when they win and Stanford has a harder time, at least by my observations over 40 years?

*And if it takes Georgia Tech coming to Palo Alto for me to buy season tickets to Stanford for the first time since my son made varsity in 2011, so be it. At least I won't be part of the problem any more. Honestly, that's about all I can do. Pritchard, these games better not be boring and having me wishing I was home to change the channel. I went to the GT-Stanford baseball Saturday game this year and traffic was horrific. A national protest that affected traffic on both El Camino and Alameda de las Pulgas, and tons of stuff on campus along with pretty clueless redcoats. But I did it.  I'll sign up for tickets but have noticed that Stanford never once asked where I went after 26 years of faithful purchases. I don't need them to ask, but they have an easy mark and never once asked. They know where I am. Wouldn't have been hard.

---

Just giving my opnion, not trying to insult anyone, but here goes:

Jacket3tree said, "Forget the excuses about alumni and they all move away. Market to the local population. (Start by stop hammering how awesome and elite and exclusive Stanford is and aren't you glad we wouldn't let the likes of you step foot in our hallowed halls.)"

I agree with Jacket3tree 100%; 

I think he is saying if you want 'Regular working class Non-Stanford BayArea/NorthernCA people' to come down on Saturdays, we are gonna have to make sure we are not perceived as  'Nerdy, Elitist, wine-sipping snobs' who are more interested in '' inventing market-consolidation apps, and AI algorithms for optimizing Crypto arbitrage strategies & private-equity takeovers",  rather than 'Regular guys and gals who love College Football & Tailgating on Saturday Afternoons ! 

Perhaps 1 of the reasons that 'Non Texas A&M folks' drive 2+ hours to KyleField (in CollegeStation, Texas), is they feel 'welcomed' &  feel like Texas A&M is a 'normal place' where they can relate.

That's exactly what I'm saying. I may be overly sensitive to the elitist vibe, but I've gotten that in spades since showing up on campus. I'll never forget two 'first couple of days' experiences:

1. Going to the Middle Avenue Safeway in Menlo to buy some food, wearing a Stanford T-shirt. I caught so much, 'oh you think you're better than me do you, asshole' flack from the young woman running the register that I vowed never to wear Stanford-identifying merch again when doing mundane things in public.

2. My first day teaching the E21 lab and I introduced who I was and where I'm from to the class. Two clowns started humming dueling banjos. My outside voice said 'that's pretty funny (it kinda was), especially when I think your grade in lab is worth a third and your grade on homework, that I also grade by the way, is another third, so while I ain't no Bert Reynolds, I am directly responsible for two thirds of your grade in this class and Professor Hsu is retiring after this quarter, so I don't know if he will care enough to save you. Anyway, let's put names to faces.'  My inside voice said, 'you assholes are lucky I have a sense of humor and ethics. Where do you get off dissing a peer institution like that. What do you think Georgia Tech is, exactly.'

I've long thought Stanford should consider a 'let us be your number 2 (team)' marketing campaign with small discounts on individual season tickets if you identify your first team. Stanford has a brobdingnagian graduate school alumni base. Larger than the undergraduate alumni base, and most graduate students received their undergraduate degrees elsewhere. When I was a student, I went to games with a bunch of wayward ACC engineering people -- Duke, UVA. Maryland and that one rabid fan who wasn't ACC but Houston. He hated UT with the heat of a thousand burning suns. Stanford started the season at home with SJSU and Texas. That dude was a fun hang at the Texas game.

My IT guy went to Nebraska and is a ginormous college football fan. I get congratulatory texts from him about Tech and Navy games. Commiseration that they didn't beat Georgia or Army. (He was also in the Coast Guard or his dad was maybe.) He melted down when Tech lost to UGA in 8OT last year, or at least put up a pretty realistic front over melting down.  His daughter went to Oregon so he flies the Dux flag and I offered free tickets to Stanford games, including against Oregon over the years. (Can't do anything about Nebraska. We aren't Nebraska and haven't played them during my fandom.) 'No thanks. They'll just make me feel like an idiot because I wasn't good enough to go there.'

[jacket3ree]

That’s kind of a non-sequitor.  If it were just the size of the metropolis near a team then Columbia should have the highest attendance in college football.  Alas, there is very little evidence that having a nearby large city has any impact on attendance.

I’m going to twist the knife a little bit but this example is illustrative.  Georgia Tech, sitting in Atlanta, a metro area with 6.3 million inhabitants, averaged 38,200 fans in 2024.  The university of Georgia, sitting in a metro area with 215,000 people (1/30 the size of Atlanta) had an average attendance of 93,000, over twice that of Georgia Tech.

Being in a large metro area is neither necessary nor sufficient to engender high attendance.  It might even be a barrier, since large metro areas have a host of competing cultural activities, not the least of which are professional sports teams.

BC

Then we should just quit, right?  I asked how do you get those people into Stanford football. Just real crowds of 30,000 instead of 10 or 15 thousand. There are more then enough to chose from - it's not like Stanford is a crappy program out in the middle of Imperial County. It's a crappy program sitting near the border of populous San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties. Assuming Stanford can win and be entertaining (big assumptions), how do you get people back, or better yet, generate new fans? Ones that are willing to drive through more than 20 minutes of traffic.*

Point well taken on UGA vs. GT attendance. Although to separate Athens from Atlanta as potential locations for fans isn't really right. They are an hour apart and Atlanta is a major job center with plenty of UGA graduates. Athens' two largest employers are UGA (11,500) and Piedmont Regional Hospital (3,300). Atlanta (Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell MSA) has an estimated 3.1 million jobs. There are far more UGA fans in Atlanta than Athens. Tech is swimming upstream in a way Stanford can't fathom.

Back in the day, GT in the heart of big City Atlanta was a bigger draw than UGA, in its bowels of hell (except for the future of cool college bands) location in terms of attendance and being a premiere Southern program despite having a niche curriculum and fewer students and alumni. Tech was a hot ticket in Atlanta when my dad was there in the 1950s. Tech left the SEC in 1964, integration happened, Tech's annual fortunes slowly waned until crashing at the end of the 70s, UGA's fortunes waxed, Dooley and then Herschel came, and everything switched. Check out attendance when the proverbial worm turned in the 1960s. Sanford Stadium had a major expansion in 1967:

1964.....Grant Field 47,395 per game.....Sanford Stadium 38,600 per game
1965.....Grant Field 47,375 per game.....Sanford Stadium 44,578 per game
1966.....Grant Field 44,578 per game.....Sanford Stadium 46,163 per game

They both draw from the same basic urban population and there was a cultural shift. Far more people from Rome or Savannah or Macon or Columbus would now drive to Athens rather than Atlanta to pack Sanford and act like the idiots they are. I wish we could draw more of the idiots honestly. That said, Bobby Dodd was packed for Clemson without that much orange and packed for Syracuse with hardly any orange and filled to the gunwales against Pitt with the CFP on the line, which is why it was so disappointing they crapped the bed right out of the gate. Still, reports are that it was electric and people will be back. Longtime fans said they had goosebumps as Tech mounted its comeback. Good old (really old even) days goosebumps. Even the neutral site Mercedes Benz game against Georgia with red seats was reported to be at least half Tech fans. Stanford isn't that different than Tech in terms of the types of students attending. So why can Tech games be a draw when they win and Stanford has a harder time, at least by my observations over 40 years?

*And if it takes Georgia Tech coming to Palo Alto for me to buy season tickets to Stanford for the first time since my son made varsity in 2011, so be it. At least I won't be part of the problem any more. Honestly, that's about all I can do. Pritchard, these games better not be boring and having me wishing I was home to change the channel. I went to the GT-Stanford baseball Saturday game this year and traffic was horrific. A national protest that affected traffic on both El Camino and Alameda de las Pulgas, and tons of stuff on campus along with pretty clueless redcoats. But I did it.  I'll sign up for tickets but have noticed that Stanford never once asked where I went after 26 years of faithful purchases. I don't need them to ask, but they have an easy mark and never once asked. They know where I am. Wouldn't have been hard.

---

Just giving my opnion, not trying to insult anyone, but here goes:

Jacket3tree said, "Forget the excuses about alumni and they all move away. Market to the local population. (Start by stop hammering how awesome and elite and exclusive Stanford is and aren't you glad we wouldn't let the likes of you step foot in our hallowed halls.)"

I agree with Jacket3tree 100%; 

I think he is saying if you want 'Regular working class Non-Stanford BayArea/NorthernCA people' to come down on Saturdays, we are gonna have to make sure we are not perceived as  'Nerdy, Elitist, wine-sipping snobs' who are more interested in '' inventing market-consolidation apps, and AI algorithms for optimizing Crypto arbitrage strategies & private-equity takeovers",  rather than 'Regular guys and gals who love College Football & Tailgating on Saturday Afternoons ! 

Perhaps 1 of the reasons that 'Non Texas A&M folks' drive 2+ hours to KyleField (in CollegeStation, Texas), is they feel 'welcomed' &  feel like Texas A&M is a 'normal place' where they can relate.

That's exactly what I'm saying. I may be overly sensitive to the elitist vibe, but I've gotten that in spades since showing up on campus. I'll never forget two 'first couple of days' experiences:

1. Going to the Middle Avenue Safeway in Menlo to buy some food, wearing a Stanford T-shirt. I caught so much, 'oh you think you're better than me do you, asshole' flack from the young woman running the register that I vowed never to wear Stanford-identifying merch again when doing mundane things in public.

2. My first day teaching the E21 lab and I introduced who I was and where I'm from to the class. Two clowns started humming dueling banjos. My outside voice said 'that's pretty funny (it kinda was), especially when I think your grade in lab is worth a third and your grade on homework, that I also grade by the way, is another third, so while I ain't no Bert Reynolds, I am directly responsible for two thirds of your grade in this class and Professor Hsu is retiring after this quarter, so I don't know if he will care enough to save you. Anyway, let's put names to faces.'  My inside voice said, 'you assholes are lucky I have a sense of humor and ethics. Where do you get off dissing a peer institution like that. What do you think Georgia Tech is, exactly.'

I've long thought Stanford should consider a 'let us be your number 2 (team)' marketing campaign with small discounts on individual season tickets if you identify your first team. Stanford has a brobdingnagian graduate school alumni base. Larger than the undergraduate alumni base, and most graduate students received their undergraduate degrees elsewhere. When I was a student, I went to games with a bunch of wayward ACC engineering people -- Duke, UVA. Maryland and that one rabid fan who wasn't ACC but Houston. He hated UT with the heat of a thousand burning suns. Stanford started the season at home with SJSU and Texas. That dude was a fun hang at the Texas game.

My IT guy went to Nebraska and is a ginormous college football fan. I get congratulatory texts from him about Tech and Navy games. Commiseration that they didn't beat Georgia or Army. (He was also in the Coast Guard or his dad was maybe.) He melted down when Tech lost to UGA in 8OT last year, or at least put up a pretty realistic front over melting down.  His daughter went to Oregon so he flies the Dux flag and I offered free tickets to Stanford games, including against Oregon over the years. (Can't do anything about Nebraska. We aren't Nebraska and haven't played them during my fandom.) 'No thanks. They'll just make me feel like an idiot because I wasn't good enough to go there.'