Legal duty? Or moral duty?
You take a school like James Madison University, a school no different from tons of others in this country… A school which recently spent tens of millions of dollars spiffing up its football stadium, and hundreds of thousands of dollars bidding on a home playoff game.
JMU is a U. A university. All that money might have been directed to education.
The last game played in JMU’s 25,000-person seating capacity stadium drew how many students? Let’s see:
Only 1,622 students came to Saturday’s game, despite JMU opening residence halls and dining facilities earlier than usual after Thanksgiving. JMU had estimated in its bid [JMU paid $200,000 for the privilege of holding this game] that 6,200 students would attend the game. Because the NCAA doesn’t allow host institutions to offer complimentary playoff tickets, JMU athletics sponsored all of the student tickets to keep them free. Documents provided to The Breeze [the campus newspaper] show that the price for each ticket was set at $10, and JMU budgeted $62,000 for the student tickets.
So let’s see if UD (notoriously weak on math) is getting this right. Correct UD if she’s wrong. In 2011, this school spent sixty-two million dollars increasing the number of seats in its football stadium to 25,000. We are now 2014, and at the last game fewer than 2,000 (non-paying) students showed up (even this figure might be optimistic, since schools typically count tickets picked up rather than human beings present). (Counting all non-student fans, the stadium was half full.) Again, this was a play-off game. Students tickets were free.
Let’s go back to that 1,622 figure. Look what the school estimated they’d get. 6,200. Off by a rather significant figure, no? You’d want to ask – where did the highly compensated athletics department at JMU (“[In 2013,] three of JMU’s top seven salaries were those of coaches.] get that figure? Out of their ass?
Where’s Nate Silver when you need him? But even so, aren’t there one or two statisticians at JMU who might have been consulted? After all, the – let’s call it the tanking pattern – is well-established…
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Tiens.
Et alors.
Ecoute.
That student up there… that JMU student going on about the duty of all people admitted to James Madison University to attend football games… She’s the cutting edge. She and her school represent the future of university football.
One option of course is to shut the program, as the University of Alabama Birmingham just did. Almost no one else is going to choose that option.
Most everyone else is going where JMU’s headed: After the endless campus newspaper articles and official statements from the coaches and angry articles in the local booster press full of threats, bribes, and recriminations, will indeed come the punishment of those unwilling to assume their duty to take one of the 25,000 seats.
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Okay, so here we go into numbers again: Figure about ten thousand locals show up at the games. James Madison has close to 20,000 students. So to fill up the stadium something around 15,000 JMU students will have to step up and do their duty.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of boredom*
Rode the fifteen thousand.
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* “Football games are fun,
but partying is more fun.
I may go for the first half,
but it gets boring after a while.”
You think sitting at a stupid three-hour football game is boring? Try sitting in a jail cell for a week.
December 11th, 2014 at 8:51AM
“Put-together”? Isn’t she complaining about how the students who did show up were dressed/accessorized?
December 11th, 2014 at 9:32AM
Mr Punch: I think she’s complaining about students who get sloppy drunk.
December 11th, 2014 at 10:32AM
Here is an interesting metric to explore: stadium capacity to undergraduate headcount: SC/UH. Let’s call this the optimism factor, as in optimism that the stadium has any chance of ever being full. A first approximation of a reasonable number might be .5 or so. At JMU, you have a stadium that seats 24,877 and 18,392 undergrads in the fall of 2012 (wikipedia), so a ratio of 1.35. By contrast, the Famous Eastern University where I work has a stadium capacity of close to 28,000 (number rounded to hinder identification by googling) and an undergraduate student body of 5,200, so a wildly unrealistic optimism factor of 5.38. There is never a problem finding a seat. This metric could be refined by taking into account an alumni factor and a local population factor, but I have to get back to my day job now.
December 11th, 2014 at 10:59AM
Thank you, Polish Peter.
I think it’s very kind of you to call it the optimism factor.
December 11th, 2014 at 11:45AM
It could also be called the delusion factor, especially if >1.
December 11th, 2014 at 12:46PM
“Almost no one else is going to choose that option.”
Um, no. I’ll take a wager that over the next 20 years at least 25 universities currently competing in the BCS level drop down to FCS, D2, D3 or drop the sport altogether. Between liability, players costs, competition for student enrollments, tuition costs, lack of federal funding, etc., dozens of universities will re-evaluate. Absent a major infusion of cash from the NFL (not impossible, but they don’t need those schools, the way they need the big conference schools), D1 football programs at these other universities are doomed.
December 11th, 2014 at 2:31PM
The California State University System has 23 campuses. Only six have a football team. Several of the largest campuses, Fullerton, Long Beach, Northridge, are football bereft, despite having populations of 30k or more.
At one time, nearly all CSUs had a team. But all faced the same reality, the game was very expensive, and the inherent university demographics worked against maintaining a football program. The profile of the average CSU student was over 30, increasingly female, and working. Y’all ain’t going to convince working women, many with children, to pay for football programs. But instead of force feeding an activity on a disinterested student body, e.g. University of New Mexico, where a school pres threw out a student no vote for increased fees earmarked for football, CSU admins acquiesced and dumped football.
The upshot is that no campus experienced an enrollment falloff despite no football. Then again, most CSU student’s don’t have the inclination nor the time to get shitfaced and riot during or after football games. Schools, such as JMU, Bama, North Carolina, Oregon, et al, serve a different market segment, one in which they market athletics. But as UD has reported, they’re facing the ’empty stadium’ syndrome, and massive deficits in their athletic departments. It’s becoming apparent that schools, such as JMU, are working on a failed business model, and the institutions are rapidly becoming obsolete.
December 11th, 2014 at 5:26PM
Well, some of your and UD facts are wrong, but I agree with the overall picture.
Despite JMU’s troubled filling the stadium on a holiday weekend, they have regularly drawn 20000+ (and yes, as noted that’s ticket counts, not real attendance). That’s why the debate there has not been about dropping football, but whether they should step up to the higher level of competition. They don’t need 15000 students to attend or 10000 locals. They have over 100,000 alumni, and 75%+ of them live within a couple hours drive to campus. That’s who pays for tickets and attends.
Of course, the tickets don’t even come close to paying for the current costs–as this article notes (http://businessofcollegesports.com/2013/10/21/should-james-madison-university-move-to-fbs/)–student fees pay for almost 80% of the cost of athletics. So, basically, students are funding athletic opportunities for a few hundred athletes and entertainment opportunities for the alumni. And those costs rise dramatically as you move up to the FBS level.
As we both have said, students and parents are going to become increasingly unwilling to serve as the cash cow for a select group of athletes and alumni fun and games.
December 12th, 2014 at 11:06AM
There is just too much entertainment available on TV for all of these teams to have adequate attendance, and a good number of students are so fixated on their cell phones that they don’t watch even when they’re there. The commercial breaks in televised games (especially in basketball) make attending them torture. The WSJ had a good article earlier this year.
December 12th, 2014 at 11:46AM
tp: The addition to these stadiums of Adzillatrons, which loudly broadcast endless ads, only makes the commercial breaks situation worse. It’s pretty degrading to be in these stadiums – especially when you throw in loud obnoxious drunks.
December 12th, 2014 at 3:40PM
I can’t watch football in a stadium anymore because you can’t see the yellow line that tells you where the first down is.