← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

University football and the “compelling reason” problem.

Student attendance at university football games is plummeting all over. Here’s a local columnist on the University of Michigan.

Hundreds of cable channels and dedicated networks ensure that practically every game is available in HDTV quality. Social media has transformed the game-day experience from a passive activity to one where fans can interact with hundreds or thousands of others in near real time.

Students are the proverbial canary in the coal mine.

Administrators who believe that winning will solve the student attendance problem are ignoring the cultural shift that’s taking place among the next generation of football fans.

Michigan and other traditional football powers need to offer fans a compelling reason to attend games, or the next renovation at the Big House might be a downsizing.

The cultural problem is that everything about the university football game experience is designed to be attractive to old men. The stadium experience is way retro. You fire up the Oldsmobile and sit in traffic; during the long walk from the parking lot you chew the fat with your golf buddies about the team’s glory days and about what the old guys who run the NCAA are doing wrong; you spend the game disapproving of the behavior of the whippersnappers in the student section and ogling the breasts on the cheerleaders…

As an old guy, you’re good at sitting still for long periods of time, unlike the restless whippersnappers who dance around and then leave the stadium the minute it looks as though the team will lose the game…

Given that students are abandoning university football to the point where soon the only students in attendance will be players or cheerleaders, and the only people in the stands will be horny old guys, UD proposes that universities accept this situation and make it a win/win in the following way:

Create a much larger cheerleading component, made up of the usual busty cohort plus the guys who used to play on the team. Choreograph these students to perform routines that will, uh, be attractive to your fan base.

The new football team, drawn from your university’s women students, will be modeled on what NBC Sports calls “the fastest-growing pro sports league in the nation.”

Margaret Soltan, June 22, 2014 4:01AM
Posted in: sport

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=44577

3 Responses to “University football and the “compelling reason” problem.”

  1. superdestroyer Says:

    I suspect that some of the change is due to the changing demographics of the student body. Does anyone really believe that the hard working Asian students with the Tiger Moms care about the football team or attending games. There are only so many students who are willing to “Pay for the Party” and those numbers are going down.

  2. JND Says:

    “ogling the breasts on the cheerleaders”

    Back in the day, cheerleaders weren’t expected to do waste time doing all this acrobatic crap. Instead, they were the most popular girls (women, at the college level). Ogling was a lot more fun then. Competitive cheerleading has harmed the ogling game. I vote for going back to fundamentals.

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    JND: LOL.

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories