They really don’t get it, do they? Here’s an article about how people are abandoning football games in droves – even in Alabama (enjoy the photo of a recent game) – and Alabama thinks the solution is to take out seats and replace them with a massive screen incessantly screaming advertising in the faces of people there to watch football. Another important part of the solution is to sell booze so that already pretty obnoxious people in the stands will become much more so, driving the few families that still attend games way far away from the stadium.

When your school can’t think of anything else to do with money, and when it’s run by dumb guys, you get this result:

Moody’s rated the University of Arkansas’ athletic revenue bonds for stadium expansion Aa2 with a stable outlook in 2016, citing 200% revenue coverage of the debt service. Since then, Razorbacks football attendance has slumped. The university saw a dramatic drop in attendance in 2018, a 2-10 season that ranks competitively as the worst in the team’s history.

“Something has changed,” said … an Arkansas native. “In a state like Arkansas where there is no professional team, the Razorbacks are the major attraction. To see attendance down like that is tough. It could squeeze them a little bit in a very competitive conference.”

… The university’s Athletics Department in 2016 issued $25 million of tax-exempt and $90 million of taxable bonds to expand Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium by more than 4,000 seats to a capacity of 76,212. The once-rabid Razorbacks fans never came close to filling the stadium in six home games in 2018, hitting a maximum of 50,988 for the team’s loss to the University of North Texas.

East Carolina’s classy football program – its larger athletic program – is beginning to piss off a generous alumnus. He shares his contempt for the deficit-ridden, student-soaking institution in a letter to the campus newspaper.

UPDATE: Soak the state!

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“The [University of Connecticut’s $40 million athletic] deficit was plugged with $30 million in institutional support and $8.5 million from student fees.

UConn football remains the department’s most expensive team to operate at more than $15.7 million last year. Also, ticket sales for the one-win team in 2018 totaled $2.4 million vs. $3.3 million in 2017.

That resulted in a $8.7 million deficit for the football team.

As of Aug. 2018, the football program’s attendance at Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field in East Hartford has declined by more than 48 percent since it peaked in 2008 when it averaged 39,331 fans per game, according to the NCAA.

UConn men’s basketball lost $5 million, while women’s basketball lost $3 million. It cost $11 million to operate the men’s basketball team and $7.8 million to manage the women’s program, the statement said.

UConn athletics spent nearly $17 million on scholarships and $14.4 million for staff and administrative support.

The athletic department also spent $17 million on salaries for coaches.”

With Title-Game Prices Plummeting more than 90 Percent, Should College Football be Worried?

We’ve been tracking disappearing attendance at university football games for years, and as stadia truly empty out, we’ll be interested to see which school pioneers live sex acts on a raised platform above the play in order to keep eyes focused more or less on the area of the field. “The experiential experience that a fan receives — positively or negatively — will affect a repeat customer,” says a University of Texas Vice President in an article noting that even Texas schools are lucky to fill half their seats for the first half of a game.

Kennesaw State’s football program is practically brand-new, so you can imagine the excitement it’s generated. Its 10,000-capacity stadium draws 2,000 or so on a good day, and coach is pissed. “There are 35,000 students here, and you tell me we can’t get 2,000 to come to a football game?”

From a link to an article a reader, John, sent me about how fatal violence outside and racist violence inside Italian soccer stadiums mirrors “darker developments in a broader segment of the Italian and indeed the European body politic,” UD was easily able to jump to other similarly appalled analyses of the increasingly unworkable business of putting on a football match in many of the world’s countries (scroll down). Africa, North Africa, South America, the Middle East — ain’t only Europe where the world’s most corruptly run game is also the most violent.  Football, “a sport with a deeply tribal nature and a large captive audience full of disenfranchised working-class males, and thus in many ways the perfect arena for the unscrupulous populist and his macho, nativist fantasies,” has an important “function in the rise of global far-right populism.”

Global football thugs are in some intriguing ways the haredim of Europe:

Their potential for violence is … so strong that pacifying them has been a matter of public order. 

Punishment is as half-hearted as Israel’s efforts to deal with its mobs of violent tribal male ultras – the ultra orthodox – and for the same reason. Violent-Corrupt-People-Is-Us. Absurd moves like making players compete in empty stadiums (there are more and more of these Beckettian theatrics across the globe), allowing only one team’s fans to attend (The Sound of One Side Clapping), or identifying ringleaders and denying them admission to games (guaranteeing violence on the streets — exactly where a nation’s women and children are cowering in an effort to get out of range of fascist gangs) accomplish nothing. Leaders like Viktor Orban want it that way. Even as tribes become smaller and smaller (“[S]tadium attendances [in Italy] plummet every year as people decide it’s better to watch games on TV rather than amid the violence and hatred of the terraces. In Serie A, stadiums are less than 60% full…”) their political and social violence, often stoked by governments, intensifies.

… now coaching Greece’s Panathinkaikos basketball team, finds his level.

Panathinkaikos owner Dimitrios Giannakopoulos is known for his temper, and was once fined $150,000 in 2015 for threatening to kill officials and their families following a EuroLeague win over CSKA Moscow.  

… but their now-deposed Cheertator only stole $40,000, while their last president apparently stole tens of millions. If UL goes after even petty thieves, the place will lose its entire administrative structure.

Inspiring!

How do they stay knee-deep in sludge?  

Exhibit A.

…* possession of loaded  DPMS Panther Arms model AR-15 Rifle …

* possession of massive amounts of drugs…

* possession with intent to deliver.

For more of the financial and reputational benefits football has brought Rutgers, go here.

 [T]he problem when a multibillion-dollar entity is tasked with regulating itself [is that] there’s little motivation for engaging in any meaningful action; all that matters is damage control. Executives are tasked with quelling negative PR while keeping the business running profitably and effectively. We saw the same problem with the international governing body of soccer, FIFA, whose anti-bribery expert resigned in frustration two years before a massive corruption scandal sparked a wave of executive arrests.

… The swift dismissal of Kareem Hunt doesn’t look quite so swift when you realize his misconduct had been an open secret for close to ten months. 

The sainted Urban Meyer resigns.

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UD thanks Wendy.

Sing it.

Bleeding eye, sucker punch
You know that we love you
We can’t help ourselves
We love you and nobody else

In and out the league
You come and you go
Leaving massive bloodshed behind
We forgive you a thousand times

When you snap a football or make a sack
We come a-running to you
You leave half-dead women behind
There’s nothing we can do

Can’t help ourselves
No, we can’t help ourselves