[Goose]

Attendance is now much worse for day games. People are doing other things during the day. I go one way or another, but the stands have more people at night.

I think you are correct, and I would be interested in why that might be the case.

My personal bias is that it isn't so much the time of day that matters, but rather the predictability that is the problem. When I was a student, there was a lot of socializing scheduled around the game. You knew when the game would be and you therefore knew the other social events, like parties, would happen later in the day. You could reliably know how to fit the various activities together. Now with the start times that are all over the map, many people (IMHO) just say "To heck with it, let's schedule the events we can control and the game happens when it happens". This produces conflicts so that people that aren't rabid fans don't/can't go. Many families with children under 14 or so have events that happen during the day that can't easily be moved. If they knew they could rely on a particular start time for Stanford football, they could put pressure on the other events to move earlier in the day, but if there is no certainty, it is hard to argue that people should get up earlier. Probably 75% of the time there would be no reason to do so. Late starts can still be accommodated in many cases, and that's why we get more fans to night games.

I know that with the TV money this random start time won't change, but IMHO that random start time is greatly accelerating the already extant loss of interest in attending college football games. Attendance would be going down anyway as football (at least on the "west coast") just doesn't have the interest it once did. It doesn't take much for people who aren't all that interested anyway to decide it is just too hard to attend. Add to that the relatively high cost of attending the games, especially if travel is involved, and people simply won't go.

[Goose]

Attendance is now much worse for day games. People are doing other things during the day. I go one way or another, but the stands have more people at night.

I think you are correct, and I would be interested in why that might be the case.

My personal bias is that it isn't so much the time of day that matters, but rather the predictability that is the problem. When I was a student, there was a lot of socializing scheduled around the game. You knew when the game would be and you therefore knew the other social events, like parties, would happen later in the day. You could reliably know how to fit the various activities together. Now with the start times that are all over the map, many people (IMHO) just say "To heck with it, let's schedule the events we can control and the game happens when it happens". This produces conflicts so that people that aren't rabid fans don't/can't go. Many families with children under 14 or so have events that happen during the day that can't easily be moved. If they knew they could rely on a particular start time for Stanford football, they could put pressure on the other events to move earlier in the day, but if there is no certainty, it is hard to argue that people should get up earlier. Probably 75% of the time there would be no reason to do so. Late starts can still be accommodated in many cases, and that's why we get more fans to night games.

I know that with the TV money this random start time won't change, but IMHO that random start time is greatly accelerating the already extant loss of interest in attending college football games. Attendance would be going down anyway as football (at least on the "west coast") just doesn't have the interest it once did. It doesn't take much for people who aren't all that interested anyway to decide it is just too hard to attend. Add to that the relatively high cost of attending the games, especially if travel is involved, and people simply won't go.