College football attendance — specifically, student attendance — has been on the decline, and even hit a 14-year low in 2014 (for background, click here).
Previous studies suggested a major factor was poor cell service inside stadiums (the age old debate: if they couldn’t post it to Instagram, were they really there?). But new studies suggest it may be much simpler — problems we’ve already been correcting at Carter-Finley.
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.
…
“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.”
