9100 Attendance

[zippy5]

10 bucks to park is really nothing. Go to any game outside the MAC and you will be happy to find a ten dollar spot.

[Spin]

Everyone's sidestepping the issue of being able to tailgate with other people and attacking the smaller point of the cost to park away from other tailgaters.

Myself I've never tailgated at the Info because of that. I can barbeque and play lawn games with the boys at home and not have to drag all that shit around. Or in a park. Either is better than doing it in an empty parking lot.

[K92]

By the way, the final FBS attendance numbers have been released and Akron averaged 9,170 which was good for last place.

http://mweb.cbssports.com/ncaaf/writer/jon-solomon/24891415/

[footballzip]

Win and people will come. Too much losing = empty seats

[K92]

Win and people will come. Too much losing = empty seats

Tired argument based on nothing but wishes and prayers. Northern has just about maxed out the MAC football success meter yet they could only muster a 13,563 average. Keep bangin' that drum, though.

[footballzip]

You start winning and build a Winning Tradition, people would start taking notice. 14-16k would look nice in Info. If we can win a few MAC Championships and participate in bowl games, I think we would have a much better fan base.

[a-zip]

Win and people will come. Too much losing = empty seats

Then why do all the other MAC teams (that have worse records) have higher attendance than us? Fu&^%ing pathetic.

[skip-zip]

Tired argument based on nothing but wishes and prayers. Northern has just about maxed out the MAC football success meter yet they could only muster a 13,563 average. Keep bangin' that drum, though.

I'm with you. I have been around this program way too long to listen to that. We've averaged FAR higher numbers with similar type success. Settling for an answer like that is just a cop-out.

But even if the numbers were better, Northern is the perfect example of the ceiling that we all face, being MAC level teams, and showing that you can beat other MAC-level teams. Northern has even had a taste of success beyond that, in addition to being able to draw from one of the most populous areas in the entire country!

We need to do a much better job of selling what we have right now. It's been done before. We've had much better community involvement with similar average success. And we no longer have the ancient facility that supposedly kept some people away for years, according to feedback. This 9k average is just pathetic. But those expecting big things if we just become a "winning MAC program" are dreaming.

We're a D-1A program in a city of 200,000, with hundreds of thousands more in the surrounding area. We are not Miami, or OU, or CMU, in that respect. We have a decided advantage over all of those schools in terms of our potential fan base. And they outdraw us? They shouldn't even be able to get remotely close. It's inexcusable.

[footballzip]

Records since Info opened

2009- 3-9

2010- 1-11

2011- 1-11

2012- 1-11

2013- 5-7

2014- 5-7

16-56 record in 6 years. What do you guys expect? Start winning and lets see what happens. Hopefully if Akron can turn things around and start winning, maybe we can start a little buzz around campus and the community and get more butts in the seats.

[Zip_ME87]

I think part of the problem is that the Zips are not fun to watch. Watching iCoach games was absolutely unbearable. TB's offense in 2012 and 2013 made the games somewhat fun, but the 2014 offense, especially 2nd half of the season, was boring.

Prior to iCoach (and Infocision), Brookhart and Owens didn't win a lot of games, but many of them were high scoring, which made them fun.

[MDZip]

By the way, the final FBS attendance numbers have been released and Akron averaged 9,170 which was good for last place.

http://mweb.cbssports.com/ncaaf/writer/jon-solomon/24891415/

So the title of this thread which was supposed to indicate disgust with the attendance at one particular game ended up being the season average. Wow. Although MAC schools are at a little disadvantage because they have to count the hundreds that show up for November Tuesday and Wednesday night games in that average. How many were at the UMass game? Less than 1,000?

[uhgrad2002]

These discussions about attendance and joining a larger conference overestimate the potential for UA to draw in fans. If you look at the potential fan base in a 25 mile radius or so, UA is not even the only D1 school. Plus a significant number of people in the area attended some other school. Then factor in the fans dedicated to the Browns and Buckeyes who are not going to change their interest (realistically, are they going to change from an NFL team or a national championship contender?) and there is not the opportunity here that there is in Boise or Utah. I doubt there is even the opportunity that exists in Cincinnati.

I think the MAC is (or was, until this weekday TV contract) the right place for UA. If the league and schools did more to market the product as exciting and affordable (future NFL stars today, up close an personal, great family value, etc...) it would have a differentiated product with appeal. Unfortunately, lack of marketing is not going to bring anyone in and a terrible TV deal is liable to drive a significant part of the existing fan base away. Moving to a "better" (and more expensive) conference is not going to help.

[Jrship35]

Let's just kill this rumor ................ There is no evidence that I have been able to find to even suggest that anyone of any decision making has even considered leaving.

I could be wrong though ..................... Anyone got anything of substance ?

[LosAngelesZipFan]

I think there is something more at work here than just winning or the way the team plays. Yes, there would more butts in seats if we were consistently a championship caliber team and were fun to watch. But, I would bet that this would be a 20% lift in attendance, lifting us from "wtf" to "that sucks", not the doubling or tripling of our average which would be needed to really fill our beautiful newish stadium. I think our consistently championship caliber, mostly fun to watch basketball team demonstrates this.

But clearly it's not just UA. All the MAC is facing this as Northern Illinois shows. The landscape of college football has changed. It's paradoxical, really, that even as ESPN has given programs like Akron's more TV time and exposure, and thus more ways to feel like a top tier program, the actual fan interest in that product seems to have waned. I think the 'professionalization' of top tier college sports has created such a disparity between the (formerly) BCS programs and everyone else, that it is harder to entice fans to go to an Akron (or other MAC school) game. I think it is easier now to follow a bigger school closely because of the internets, ESPN, the Big Ten channel, etc. It's like Ohio State is a black hole, and the rest of the state is caught in it's gravitational pull.

And this is all going to get much worse as payment to players starts to happen. A school like Ohio State or USC has hundreds of multi-millionaires giving the football program huge support, on top of huge TV money from their conferences, their ticket sales, etc. I just saw one figure that said OSU pulls in over $7M per game in ticket sales alone, which I think is more than half of the annual Zips football budget. We just don't have the scale to compete with that.

A few weeks back I met with Arizona State's marketing team, and one topic of discussion was the challenge they were having in getting local alums to their football games. That's a school with 80,000 students and a massive alumni base in the immediate area (something like 400K alum within 20 minutes of the stadium), challenging for the PAC 12 title and ranked in the top 20 nationally.

UAB shutting their program is foreshadowing. College football played at our level is on an unsustainable course. Winning would be very helpful. A wide open, fun offense would be great. But just like we had hoped a brand new stadium would dramatically improve the attractiveness of the program, these things are probably only going to improve things at the margins. That won't be enough to help us compete with a tier of programs that are jumping into hyper drive.

[Dave in Green]

LosAngelesZipFan, that's a great observation about the professionalization of college football leading to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Looking at the numbers in that story, 17 of the bottom 20 teams in attendance showed attendance losses last season compared with just 5 of the top 20. This parallels what's happening in other areas of society. Years ago most local TV stations had more locally produced shows that were gradually replaced by more network shows and more recently by cable shows and internet video streaming. Similarly, shopping has slowly transitioned from locally owned shops to big chains and now the internet.

Sports fans used to primarily support local teams. But the globalization of sports media coverage makes it easy today to adopt a college football team across the country and track it as easily as a local team. So fans are becoming more selective in picking big winning programs to follow. They no longer feel obligated to be locked into backing a small losing program just because it's the home team. That's one of the reasons why so many Akron area college football fans have latched on to that team in Columbus and ignore their home team in Akron. They shop college football teams like they shop products on Amazon.com. Local purchases are limited in selection while you can get anything you want delivered to your door at a great price from shopping on the internet.

In this environment, even a winning UA program is limited in its growth potential as Northern Illinois has so clearly demonstrated.

[Balsy]

Well said DiG.

[K92]

So the title of this thread which was supposed to indicate disgust with the attendance at one particular game ended up being the season average. Wow. Although MAC schools are at a little disadvantage because they have to count the hundreds that show up for November Tuesday and Wednesday night games in that average. How many were at the UMass game? Less than 1,000?

The announced attendance was 5571. My guess is that is the number of season ticket holders because there were definitely no walk up sales on that night. Actual attendance? Perhaps 300?

[Captain Kangaroo]

Win, and a trained monkey should be able to fill InfoCision to 20K regularly.

One caveat - don't schedule games at 8pm on Tuesday nights in November.

[johnnyzip84]

The announced attendance was 5571. My guess is that is the number of season ticket holders because there were definitely no walk up sales on that night. Actual attendance? Perhaps 300?

I was thinking about 250, K92 - it's always hard to figure home many are high up and out of the elements in games at the Info. Of the folks who were actually out there in the cold, it couldn't have been more than 300.

[K92]

I was thinking about 250, K92 - it's always hard to figure home many are high up and out of the elements in games at the Info. Of the folks who were actually out there in the cold, it couldn't have been more than 300.

Buffalo announced 17343 for the 11/11 game versus the Zips. Can you give us an estimate of actual attendance on that Tuesday night?

[skip-zip]

These discussions about attendance and joining a larger conference overestimate the potential for UA to draw in fans. If you look at the potential fan base in a 25 mile radius or so, UA is not even the only D1 school. Plus a significant number of people in the area attended some other school. Then factor in the fans dedicated to the Browns and Buckeyes who are not going to change their interest (realistically, are they going to change from an NFL team or a national championship contender?) and there is not the opportunity here that there is in Boise or Utah. I doubt there is even the opportunity that exists in Cincinnati.

Why?

Cincinnati has the Bengals, and Cleveland has the Browns. That's even.

Cincinnati is closer than us to Cowlumbus. They are also in the same city where Xavier is often a contending, nationally-recognized basketball program. They also have Dayton, Miami, and even the mighty Kentucky Wildcats, in relatively close proximity.

In our situation, there are NO D-1 schools in the entire Northeast and North Central part of Ohio that play D-1A football other than Ken+. That's a pretty populated area to really have only 2 "local" choices.

I always harp about what Cincinnati has accomplished in their area. But when you really look closely at the geography, I think NE Ohio is an even more favorable climate for an Akron uprising than the SW corner of Ohio was for Cincinnati.

[Hilltopper]

I would estimate there were around 200 fans in the Club seats area for the UMASS game.

[Dave in Green]

Ohio has 8 D-IA football teams -- 5 more than Illinois or Pennsylvania, 4 more than Indiana, 3 more than Michigan, even 1 more than California. Only Texas has more (11).

[footballzip]

People always go with a winner. Its easy to be an OSwho fan. I think Meyer only lost a couple games since he's been there. They even have a chance to play for a national championship. Easy place to win when you get all the 5 star recruits from Ohio and other states. Where the MAC schools fight for what's left.

We (the MAC) and Cincinnati are always going to be second fiddle to the Columbus juggernaut. I'm not asking much, just have some winning season's, maybe a MAC championship every few years, and a chance to play in the "Famous Idaho Potato Bowl" or some other no name bowl. 12-14 k people in the Info would be fine.

[a-zip]

My bad, I get it now......... win and they will come. I mean just look at our women's basketball team's attendance skyrocketing

11/14 1205

11/15 668

11/18 1262

11/25 531

12/5 592

Nevermind.....