A slow but steady slippage in live attendance [at football games] doesn’t mean a precipitous slide is ahead for college football. Lucrative television broadcast contracts are a much more important source of revenue; strong TV ratings, which haven’t seen a similar decline, not ticket sales drive those contracts.
Venture capital, as UD has noted before on this blog, should be looking into animatronic-college-student startups: Firms that produce in bulk twenty-ish rah-rah student bodies that can quickly be shipped and distributed throughout empty stadium seating areas. Clients would be in charge of campus-specific ornamentation (local beer brews, hats with the name of the relevant school on them, team face paint); the firm would be hired to plausibly replicate and animate hundreds of generic fans.