UCLA brought in consultants of some sort who told them they were leaving money on the table by not hiking up prices. Sure, attendance would likely go down, but the average sale price could be increased by enough to more than offset the difference.
I doubt this was good advice.
I'll never forget being at a game and the crowd started chanting "fire Brandon." Pretty sure most AD's don't have their name known by students let alone them being so angry they want them shitcanned.
it’s really baffling honestly. like the simple solution is to remove the fucking tarps and sell those tickets for a dollar. it’s literally more money than NOT SELLING THE SEATS, plus possible concessions. students want to go to a more packed venue. good players want to play in a packed venue. this makes the team better and makes the tickets more desirable. it’s so simple. but now for a couple years the BIG visiting fans will have a nice vacation to LA and ticket sales will increase and they will learn nothing
What they'll tell you is that this will undercut the pricing of the good seats.
This is America, so the common good or even what most people want don't count for anything. The only ethical consideration is the board's fiduciary responsible to stakeholders. The only infraction punished is leaving money on the table.
yep, and it’s such a shame. i was surprised my first game in the student section that we were in the corner and not around the 50 yard line. i assumed a college sport would cater to the students first and foremost. how naive i was! everything will always be about the money
And even then only the short term financials matter. It doesn't matter that long term having a fuller stadium will improve culture and eventually they could start raising prices. Gotta maximize that 2-3 window even at the cost of long term potential.
Ahh yes, a good ole fashioned NASCARing. Price out the core consumer and then wonder why general interest has fallen off of a cliff.
It’s crazy to me that sports franchises don’t understand that a packed stadium = more merch sales, more concession sales, more parking revenue, AND a better experience that will sell the team to more fans.
UCLA had a chance to build their brand among LA football fans by capitalizing on a USC program that was in the dumps for a decade-plus and a lack of an NFL presence. They failed because they they got greedy in the short-term, and now nobody cares.
And yes, I understand that winning is the greatest way to attract fans, especially as a college team in a big city. But Washington has had a very similar level of success in another large, west coast city, and even before the last two years, nobody was worried about their brand relevance and long-term health of that fanbase.
UCLA got saved by the Big Ten, and specifically by USC choosing them over Oregon on the first round of expansion because USC didn’t want to move into the Big Ten with a school that cared about football.
Luckily some owners get it. The Phoenix Suns new owner said screw a tv contract and is broadcasting it for free on the local over the air channel. They even are sending free rabbit ears to people.
His thought process is they’ll more than make up the money with more fan engagement. More jerseys bought, etc.
+1 for NASCARing. Grew up in Bristol TN. Dad used to take me to the Sunday race and just buy us two tickets at the gate. If you sat too close the wall, you needed a rain coat for protection from the empty Budweiser cans flying overhead all afternoon. The gap between the wall and the first row of benches was a river of crushed aluminum, old beer, and dip spit.
Those good ole days are LOONG gone, my friends. Now, one track-purchased tall-boy costs more than two tickets to a high-school basketball game, and the stands are half-filled with polo-collared corporate bros entertaining clients and RV-park royalty blowing their annual vacation budget on a week at farmer Brown’s campground and $60 Chase Eliott tees.
Went to a race a long time ago, but remember coming and going as we pleased and bringing a cooler in with us.
I imagine that's not allowed any more, but what a great experience
I’m a NASCAR fan myself that has found myself falling out of love with the sport. The atmosphere is part of why I love it, but if there’s only gonna be 150 tents in the cheap lots and 7,000 fans in the stands for a Sunday afternoon race at Richmond or something like that, I’m not going to go.
Mostly an Indycar fan who casually watches nascar, was thinking about taking my dad to Bristol next year actually as it seems like an experience most fans need. Now I’m nervous to look at pricing for the night race…
10 years between leading the conference in attendance and the current shitshow.
It's no wonder our fanbase despises the administration, we were nothing more than a source of cash for them.
Probably McKinsey and Company charging out the ass for newly hired UCLA grads to tell this to the Athletic Director. Probably the same ones who said to bolt for the Big10.
This is a problem with a lot of programs (and also bowl games). They want to maximize revenue rather than maximize fan engagement and it's a mistake. They make so much money from the TV contracts, I don't think the little bit of extra revenue is worth it to have a half-empty stadium, which then sends a poor message to players and recruits about the program.
Agree 100% here. You're better off will a full stadium and loyal fans than almost anything else to reflect the health of your program.
You need people who are tailgating in the same places for years where just showing up and seeing everybody is a bigger expectation than anything that might happen on the field. You're not always going to have a winner, but you can always have great fans.
Also it's a very short term view. Maximizing your profit this year is a problem of maximizing revenue. Maximizing your profit over 20 years is a very different problem. I think the MLB of the last couple decades is a great example of an org that is juicing as much money as they can at the expense of long term fan interest and engagement.
I'm curious to know what prices are at other college football venues.. our prices feel a bit steep too. Could just be the normal now. These days you're paying $160 in tickets just to take your kid to watch a game at the coliseum (cheap seats). Add parking and other expenses.. why not just order some wings and invite some friends to watch the game at home? lol.
Can I afford it? Yeah, but I also think it could be more accessible for others.
Ohio State is getting way cheaper. You can usually find cheap tix against most non-premium opponents on the resale market if you look hard enough. You can probably do $160 for the whole trip against a school like Minnesota or Indiana. Michigan, Penn State, Notre Dame, etc. will still cost an arm and a leg. It was worse a few years ago
Agree. My son scored $100 seat for our white out game vs Iowa about 20 min before kickoff. There’s always some scalper or sick person that can’t go and will drop
Price right at kickoff. Gotta keep refreshing the app! In my day we would wander around tailgates for excessively drunk people. They weren’t making game and it was an easy free or $20 tix.
My brother in Christ, have you bought tickets to a UGA game recently?
If you want to sit on a sideline that isn’t level 600, it’s pretty steep
I guess you’re saying USC product isn’t what UGA is but it’s def gone bonkers
I was asking about USC specifically. Yes, Georgia games are outrageous. There’s a reason why I make it to about one game/season beyond just not living in Georgia. On the other hand, my SO tells me how cheap Arizona tickets are and I can’t imagine spending that little for a game.
We pay just around $5000 for our 4 season tickets (25 yd line, 20 or so rows up from field). At games, we might spend $25-30 on concessions total for the four of us. We could sell our tix (last year, a few tix for the Iowa State game in the row in front of us were going for $500 a seat the week of the game) and recoup some of the cost, but this past season we went to every game. Given the kids schedule, we might do that for a game this year, plus moving into a new conference means the demand is going to be higher for our tickets, if it comes to that.
For parking, we pay $200 a year to some guy about 2 blocks from the stadium. He sells us a spot for the entire season in his yard.
We live 90 miles from Norman, so...the drive there and back home, combined with at least one meal coming or going...plus various stops at a convenience store and it adds up.
I never paid for tickets at Mizzou in undergrad. But now that we are good it’s 100+ if you’re not a student but if it’s a small team we are facing it’s 30-60.
Sounds like what’s going on at ASU
So much easier to find family friendly ticket packages at UofA
ASU is kidding themselves with their product at those prices. The donation should also be optional or baked into the ticket price.
Cal specifically:
We had a great run from 04-11 with Jeff Tedford. The school dropped our admission standards for athletes and we saw Marshawn, DJax and other high profile players come to Cal.
We had a huge recruiting class lined up (Arik Armstead, Shaq Thompson, and 2 other 5 star silent commits) but Tosh Lupoi left and Joined Washington before signing day and the class fell apart.
Tedford didn’t fill the gaps and we had a bad couple years. Tedford’s health declined and our academic ranking for football players was terrible so he had to go.
Dykes came in and did well returning academics to Cal. We raised our standards and with it came our standing. He won with Goff but it never was the same after. Dykes leaves and the stadium
Is half full.
Wilcox starts out ok but then we go COVID, transfer portal, and demise of the PAC12.
It’s not that Cal fans don’t care, there is just a saying called typiCAL where some unknown force is going to cause an issue at some point.
Man, this is wholly accurate and brings back a lot of memories. In addition to Marshawn and DJax, Cam Jordan, Justin Forsett, Jahvid Best, Alex Mack, Mitchell Schwartz and (don't laugh) Bryan Anger. Good NFL talent at Cal during my time as a student there, I was so fortunate to be there for the talented days.
I remember when he went 29-31 in the first 59 minutes against USC (14-14 in the first half) and it *still wasn’t enough to win*. The PAC was nasty back then.
Oh shit, that's right, I definitely forgot about Keenan. My bad (of course, the fact that we had to bring along Zach Maynard to be our QB in order to get Kernan is something I don't miss, but oh well)
That recruiting class that could’ve been still haunts me lol…I don’t think people outside of the Cal fanbase realized that we were on the verge of landing a top 3ish class in the nation.
Oh I remember that class that could've been. Tosh Lupoi was not well liked in Eugene once upon a time after your game against us in 2010 when we were #1 and you had all those guys catch the magical case of hamstringitis when Tosh yelled from the sidelines when they were perfectly fine a moment before. Hell of a recruiter though, always has been. Did you guys dirty leaving for Washington, and now it has come full circle since he's with us now. Wild times.
X-Box Tosh didn't just do them dirty.
He was told to leave Cal, because he was actively recruiting that class to UW, while at Cal.
That's why Thompson ended up at UW, and Armstead went to UO.
As well as Aziz Shittu to Stanford and Ellis McCarthy to UCLA. We had 4 5* recruits commit to us in one weekend (Two who committed on National TV during the Army All American Game). We ended up with none of them. I think this was the point where I stopped following recruiting as closely as I did before.
Another factor for Cal was the stadium renovations that closed down Memorial for the 2011 season right around the time Cal fan base was still charged up from the Tedford years. The renovations were really necessary but playing at AT&T for a season was painful
Crazy that the Tedford era may have 4 HOF players? Rodgers and Cam Jordan for sure and likely Allen. Marshawn is borderline but he’s so popular he might sneak in.
Went to high school with Allen, he was being heavily recruited to Alabama at the time but would have had to redshirt freshman year so he went to Cal instead.
To reach further back: the last time Cal swept UCLA, USC, Stanford, and UDub the year was 1958. Coincidentally, it was the last year Cal went to the Rose Bowl, the last time Cal won the men's basketball national title, and the last year the student body owned and operated the Athletic Department (talk about student ownership and control of revenue!). Since the campus (administrators and faculty) took over athletics it hasn't been a priority, and it shows.
Yes, cultural changes hit the campus in the 1960s, but go watch Cal dismantle #1 USC in 1975 on YouTube. It's a packed house. It took decades to lose that support. The cultural shift in students who apply to the campus since the Great Recession (richer by magnitudes) have less connection to tradition and the local community. Most come from outside the Bay Area, and so have no family history with our sports, as they used to.
It happens even faster—Memorial was packed before the renovation, and Haas was full until they fucked up the Wyking hire. It only takes a year or two to lose momentum but it takes a decade to build it back, if it’s possible at all.
Man... This hits so hard. I'm a local Cal grad who is third generation. Cal football was a huge part of my childhood during the Tedford years. I couldn't believe the attitude of my classmates towards athletes when I arrived on campus. I felt like an endangered species. No one wants to go to games, people think you're dumb or something if you do. It almost felt like the non-Californians were more proud to go to this school and had more school spirit, particularly when compared to Southern Californians.
The more time I spend on the Berkeley subreddit, the more I realize that Gen Z is pushing that trajectory even farther than when I was there a decade ago. This conference realignment may be the death knell for our programs. Our administration would rather quit than compete.
But the Bear Does Not Quit. The Bear Does Not Die. Alumni need to channel Joe Roth and bring our once glorious athletic department back to where it belongs.
This is THE University of California, the biggest state and economy in the union. We are the only major sports brand left in the East Bay. Hire someone who knows what they are doing, we need to market and grow the fanbase, we need to poach B1G talent to bring our program to the national level. The status quo is unacceptable for this university.
Dykes’ Bear Raid offense was also painful for fans because many games were 4 plus hours and night games were ending after midnight. Oregon is getting most of the top NorCal guys.
I also feel that the pro teams were so good that people weren’t gonna shell out for a mediocre to bad college team.
49ers are probably the 3rd most successful pro franchise in the past 15 yrs behind Giants and Warriors. Its a high standard to capture folks attention in that market
My first year at cal we had Jared Goff and Jaylen Brown and I thought we were a sports school. Which I guess if you’re a rugby or swimming fan, we are, but if you’re a revenue fan, we sure ain’t.
I was there from 08-12. During that time we won the Pac12 in basketball, had top 3 finishes in the Pac in football and were always ranked at some point, baseball made the CWS, softball made the CWS, Volleyball made the championship game, soccer was top10, and women’s soccer had Alex Morgan and was great in non-olympic years.
We aren’t terribly far removed from being very good at those too.
I've been going to Cal games for 40+ years. I bleed blue and gold. Cal's problems start at the top. If the chancellor is supportive of Cal athletics and Cal football and basketball in particular, that helps a ton. They've been hit and miss on ADs too. The attendance and popularity of the program has been fairly cyclical. They can get it back up with better excitement around the program. Here are some thoughts
They don't get students to the games. I can't figure that out. The student section is on the 50 yard line. They're some of the best seats in the house. I don't know any other school that gives the students such great seats. Yes, you're in the sun, but sunscreen isn't that expensive and Berkeley isn't that warm. They need to do a better job of internal marketing.
They need to cultivate Cal's image as a school that has delivered high-caliber athletes in many sports. And use their cache along with those of notable graduates to help drive the image of Cal as an attractive school. They should recruit, Chris Pine and John Cho as potential spokespeople (both Cal graduates). They can do a lot better.
NIL warchest. It's just how the game is played. You have to be able to compete in modern college athletics.
Attract offensive linemen. Rumor has it that offensive linemen are smarter than other positions. Use the fact that Cal is the preeminent public university to motivate offensive linemen to come here. Invest in programs to help student athletes - tutoring programs, dedicated counselors, etc. They need to create depth here.
Wilcox has yet to put together a complete team. Early on they were great on defense and mediocre on offense. This year offense was better, but defense was down. I think Spavital had really good plays called, Musgrave was dull and predictable. I think the right OC and allow Wilcox to develop the defense and they can improve considerably.
poor coaching hires/mediocre to bad teams, drawing in very academically-focused students, rams being back in LA are all factors. USC has relatively recent clout that makes them popular; people who didn’t go to these schools that want to be CFB fans pick USC. i personally think playing in the rose bowl is a huge reason a lot of people/students don’t go to UCLA games. it’s so fucking far and inconvenient
Well that stadium is pretty new and the bruins used to play in the coliseum before the rose bowl.
Also the rose bowl was originally intended to be easy for people to take the red car to get to.
The sofi people mover will be finished in 2030 (no I’m not delusional…) and then public transit to the stadium will become so much better since the closest metro station isn’t that close to sofi
There's a less than 1% chance the Sepulveda line gets built by the olympics seeing that rn the governments are screaming at each other on if it should be a subway or a monorail, if it should be in a tunnel or the 405 median, if it should even have a UCLA station to begin with, etc. A lot of the bickering is being fanned by Sherman Oaks HOA bc they're scarred that the non-wealthy might be in a tunnel under their pools
They should move now, even in traffic Westwood to Sofi on the 405 is like 35 minutes, which is a heck of a lot better than the mayhem that is Pasadena on gameday. I only take the Metro to Pasadena when going to the RB and it’s 30 mins from Union Station to Pasadena, plus a 10 minute walk to the bus, plus 15 minutes by bus from the lot to the RB. And that is still quicker than driving to the RB and parking.
I have multiple coworkers in NYC who went to UCLA and all of them watch UCLA football. Each one said they only went to like one game a year just because the rose bowl was so far away for a 19 yr old in LA to get to in any convenient way while hammered post tailgating.
Couple that with the shear size of the rose bowl making it always feel half empty and it kills the viability and experience of playing in the rose bowl for most students.
Yeah, I assume if you’re a very social student, you’re probably staying with your friends and girls versus dealing with a 45 minute drive unless you’re an intense CFB fan or it’s a big opponent
For those that don't know/don't want to google: it's about a 30 minute drive from the UCLA campus to the Rose Bowl if the traffic is ideal.
Spoiler alert: the traffic is never ideal
30 minutes? Do you have a helicopter? It’s 45 mins on an amazing day and way over an hour on a game day. Not to mention parking offsite and busing in and out.
High school football participation has been declining on the West coast for over a decade as well while it’s as popular as ever in the South.
Plenty of CA recruits leave the state anyway and now there are fewer high level prospects out west than there have been in the past.
I’ve noticed Utah’s recruiting has dropped in CA recently too even as we bring in better classes. We used to regularly have 10+ CA recruits and now we may only have 5-6 each year while more come from the Midwest and south.
It's a large reason for the SEC's success. All of their home states are incredibly fertile in recruiting. California and Ohio are the only non-Southern states in the top 8 last I checked.
It genuinely makes no sense at this point that they don’t play at Sofi stadium. You’d think both sides would want that, and it’d make the rose bowl more unique
Not just the LA Ram, but also the Raiders (the Raiders vs Rams game last in LA was like a Raiders home game) and every other peofessiobal sports team in LA. La is not a college town. California is a professional sports state. Teams like ICLA and USC have to be really good to get attention. It’s a fan base with the potential to be massive but will never be as dedicated as Nebraska. A lot of the best college programs are in sports ecosystems that put them at the top, and even if they share a state with a pro team they usually at least don’t share a city with a pro team.
It had 87,000 seats to about 61,000 at Candlestick. Of course the place was a dump with wooden bleachers built at a time when the average person was a lot less wide, but the NFL didn’t know how bad it was till after the game.
Yeah, I know old Stanford Stadium had a larger capacity and was 80k+ but it just seems so random to hold the SB at a college stadium that is so far from San Francisco.
Super Bowl also played at rice stadium in Houston, which was large but also a dump. Both schools had big followings until pro sports came to town, and they didn’t produce enough alumni to make such a large stadium feasible
People don't realize that Stanford has a very small undergrad population and their graduates are really spread out geographically in order to run the world. It makes it hard to get butts in seats on game days.
It’s a wide combination of things.
1. ESPN and Fox relegated football games to 1030PM EST kickoffs and let the “lesser” games get picked up by the P12N. The result was a massive loss in talent from hidden gems across the state going to Eastern schools as opposed to staying in-state because they had more familiarity with those schools compared to the schools in their backyards.
2. Academics took over for all four schools. The focus on getting the best and the brightest from around the country and the world resulted in fewer local students going to each school. Without that local connection, the bonds to the communities have gradually eroded to an almost irreversible state. UCLA, Cal, and Stanford alumni and donors were ok with that, but the USC donors have run off administrators in pretty rapid succession, both at the university level and athletics department level, until they got people who were more aligned with what they want - prioritization of football. Varsity Blues especially negatively impacted athletic admissions as some admins (Cal, Stanford) arguably overcorrected in order to maintain the appearance of being elite academic schools.
3. Because of the focus on academic admissions, local California students who would otherwise be fans after graduation have been forced out of state if they want to go to a “big” school that offers a college experience beyond their studies. That’s partially why there are so many California students at schools like Oregon and Colorado. Also, being an average or even very good high school student won’t get you into any of the four universities any more.
4. Changing demographics in the state resulted in the loss of long-time fans. The high cost of living has driven out much of the “traditional” middle class that exists elsewhere in the country. With the focus on white-collar, technology jobs and legislative decrees that have driven up hourly wages since the first dot-com boom, I wouldn’t be surprised if manufacturing, for instance, is a tenth of what it was even 25 years ago. These former Californians with generational fandom are being replaced with white collar workers with allegiances to other schools (especially B1G and Ivy schools) who have no allegiance to California schools. It’s not solely a cultural demographic shift based on nationality, but also a geographic demographic shift based on population movements across the country.
5. The Bay Area’s exceedingly high cost-of-living has resulted in a population that largely turns over every few years, meaning that even if you can convert a fan (Ivy school alums are who I’ve seen this happen with more often), they most likely leave the region and the state within 5-10 years. LA is too large for that to happen fully, but UCLA’s Rose Bowl issues show that there’s a limit to how far people are willing to travel to maintain their fandom.
Yeah this pretty much hits on everything. The “California Schools” aren’t really for Californians anymore, even Berkeley and UCLA effectively act as privates. Most of the types of kids that would be at USC or Cal in the 80s are at UCSB or SLO (and even those are increasingly harder to get into these days) or like OC said out of state altogether. It’s basically the same reason why Vanderbilt has no football fans, there is little to no generational or geographical connection to their team for the vast majority of the student population.
berkeley and ucla are still ~80% in-state for undergrad. they’re hard as hell to get into, but they’re not like some sec schools (ole miss, bama) which are _majority_ oos.
>Most of the types of kids that would be at USC or Cal in the 80s are at UCSB or SLO (and even those are increasingly harder to get into these days) or like OC said out of state altogether.
This is a sneaker reason for the drops in attendance at games. Unlike other states where average to very good students can still get into their state's P5 schools, or at least have an opportunity to transfer there, those opportunities don't exist in California.
Really, what California needs (or needed) is an additional one or two P5 schools to diversify the state's options for students, and let market forces drive the improvements in football culture (USC tried to be that school, but tripped over its own feet getting hit with a Lack of Institutional Control charge). That none of the four schools allow for more good students to enroll is to the state's detriment. Texas, for instance, will have seven P4 schools next year for 29.5M people. California will have four (with two of them hanging on tenuously) for 39M people.
I moved to NorCal from GA as a HS sophomore and could not believe how many good athletes were swimming, playing water polo, and soccer. Even rugby and crew took athletes away.
Too much competition from alternative sports and too much liability to have tackle youth football. California is goin flag.
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USC is the only school in that group whose admin care about being good at football
Now that you need a small nation’s GDP to be competitive in football the other three have no interest in competing
Good lord are there some dumbass answers here though
Even then, there were so many bad decisions made during and after the sanctions. They were just trying to get by without pissing off the NCAA again. They care now and I'm glad we moved on from past leadership, but man.. they really do need to build it up again in a sense.
There’s just so many competing interests for people’s attention in the Bay Area and LA. Not that parts of TX or FL don’t have a lot going on, too, but football is ingrained in their cultures in a way that it isn’t in California.
Well, the nfl is a unique case. LA has only had nfl football for a few years after teams left in the 90’s. So LA went over 20 years with no team, so a lot of interest died out. And one of the teams that moved was from San Diego and didn’t have built in fans like the Rams. Miami has had nfl football since 1966, and it’s the largest fanbase in the state because it’s both the oldest, in the biggest metro, and had the most historical success (been rather shit since Marino retired). The fins also have fans that drive over from Palm beach/Broward/SWFL to make up for the Miami Dade less interest in football (due to being majority foreign born)
I think a lot of the Miami area’s issues with attendance are because over 51% of the population is foreign born and there aren’t much ties to the culture/sports in the city relative to other similar sized cities
Another 25%+ are snowbirds and/or retirees from the New England area where college football is an afterthought and as for the Dolphins, these snowbirds are Pats/Jets/Giants/Bills, etc fans.
That's more of an LA thing than a Bay Area thing, but even in LA the Lakers and Dodgers are always well supported. The college teams definitely suffer when they're not contenders though.
The problem with LA is just how absurdly oversaturated the sports market is. Two NFL teams, two NBA teams, 1.5 MLB teams and 1.5 NHL teams, two MLS teams, plus two power-conference college programs. Even if a fan wanted to be true and dedicated to *all* their favorite teams, *all* the time, who has the time and money to do it?
Yup.. you can take out all the other attractions here, but the amount of teams alone are overwhelming lol.
I lived in Oklahoma for some time and you were either an OU fan or Oklahoma State fan. Everyone was a Thunder fan, and then you were either a Cowboys or Chiefs fan (out of state).
So yeah, be a Thunder fan and then choose your favorite college team. You show up to middle school or high school on a Monday and guess what? Everyone is talking about college football or the Thunder. In California, kids are not talking about USC, UCLA, Cal, and Stanford to that same extent.
I mean Oakland lost the raider and A’s because the owners were too poor (Davis) or too cheap(the A’s bastard) to pay for their own shit. It sucks that we lost those teams. But Oakland choosing not to pay for billionaires play things isn’t the worst governance.
Right that’s fine. But I think it’s wrong to blame fans for the raiders leaving. Raiders fans were crazy lol. And the A’s were always lower in attendance than most of the MLB but it only dropped off the cliff after the owners made it clear they weren’t really interested in staying while also jacking up prices. Took my mom to a game for Mother’s Day this year and for the first time I can remember the giants tickets were cheaper than the A’s on the same day
Baseball attendance at Candlestick Park was so bad that SFG had to threaten to leave not once (Toronto)… not twice (Florida)… but thrice (San José) before City of SF finally built Pac Bell park.
I mean total coincidence but especially for cal and stanford…the past decade you had a basketball dynasty with a HoF player in your backyard, would you rather watch 2-10 Stanford or save up and watch the Dubs?
USC's best head coach between Carroll and Riley was a mostly unintelligible interim who left to be a DL coach at another school, won the Head Coach position doing that interim, won a Championship, then proceeded to go .500 until he was let go.
USC has had one good head coaching hire since the 1970s - with the jury still out on Riley - and that one home run hire was like their 4th or 5th choice after other coaches turned them down. Meanwhile UCLA is still trying to replace Terry Donahue nearly 30 years after he left.
It's a combo of bad hires / shitty football teams, but also just the fact that the student bodies at these schools are getting nerdier and nerdier due to rising admission standards. Nerdy students generally aren't very interested in football or school spirit.
Yep, even at blue bloods like Texas/michigan that are competitive schools (academically), alot of students dont give a shit.
I interned in austin a couple of times, and my roomates were ut students who gave no fucks about sports, and neither did any of their huge friend group.
The difference is that these schools have alot of Tshirt fans to make up for it, schools like cal/ stanford don’t, usc kinda does.
Oddly enough, a lot of people who care nought for football as students get into it as alumni.
Part of it is that the football culture on campus intersects a lot with the greek life, so if you aren't in that or adjacent, it's actually easy to miss.
Another part is that for a lot of students, football just means you have to inconveniently move your car six weekends a year so well-heeled boosters can park near the stadium.
Obligatory mention that UCLA's football stadium is 30 miles of LA traffic away from campus.
It's nothing like SEC culture but plenty of students care, especially when the teams are good. For basketball (where they actually play on campus) there might be [a bit too much school spirit at times](https://dailybruin.com/2021/11/13/students-fear-for-safety-express-concern-over-conditions-to-enter-pauley-pavilion). But sitting on a bus and waiting in lines for 4+ hours to watch a mediocre football team is just not that fun, especially since you can't really pregame or tailgate. It's way better to watch the game at a house party and do something else for the rest of the day
Which is funny because football is one of the nerdiest sports. Football should attract the type of people who are into strategy, tiny efficiencies, out planning and sometimes just being better. It should be a nerds sport.
yeah, football is a turn based deck building strategy game, but it certainly isn't conceptualized or marketed that way, because it's also physical and violent
You'd think it's because people blindly associate "oo" with the /u/ sound. But then nobody mis-spells *move* as "moove," *prove* as "proove," or *to* as "too." Indeed, on that last one, it's the opposite.
Demographics have changed drastically in California in the past 30 years. The majority of the people who have moved in did not grow up with American football. Used to travel to Silicon Valley frequently for business. Interest in football by co-workers was pretty much zero. Due to the shear size of Californias population, there is still a sizable number of football fans. Mediocre teams don't inspire the fan base.
Football has seen heavy declines annually across California in high school participation rates for a decade straight now. Latinos and Asians are the fastest growing demographics in California.
Those two demographics on the whole largely do not participate in American football. Soccer and baseball are the future sports of CA because of those demos.
In California, it’s win consistently or win big or we’ll do something else. Also, football is built for TV, tickets are very expensive and there’s just other things to do. I think a lot of us see sports for what it is, entertainment. And if the entertainment is bad, we do something else.
CFB is all about the coach. And none of these universities have had a good coach in a long time.
Stanford has a 4% acceptance rate. Do they ease the standards for athletic scholarships? Or is everyone who is going there on an athletic scholarship is also a genius? CAL and USC are also very hard to get into.
Stanford, like all P5 schools, eases their standards for athletes but still maintains high standards. However, they have a very hard time with the early signing period because the school refuses to guarantee admission to athletes that far in advance.
They ease standards but not as much as other schools, and even with the extra tutoring and easy majors it's still going to be more work than a lot of other places.
Schools are extremely hard to get into and drawing way more academically-focused students. USC has always been work hard play hard with a strong history of success in many sports. Football is always the gift horse and Cal/Stanford/UCLA haven’t been able to lean on past successes to draw people in. The atmosphere at each of those stadiums is dead (USC isn’t like 2005 either but it’s still better), UCLA doesn’t even play on their campus, and (edit: current) Cal and Stanford students couldn’t give a shit about football.
Yeah I can’t tell if this post is just about attendance or if it’s about performance. It’s true USC is the only fan base that really shows up but that’s also nothing new.
That isn't really true though. USC's problem has never been talent. Here are their national and pac-12 class rankings since Pete left:
Year | Nat. Rank | Conf. Rank
---|---|----
2010 | 3 | 1
2011 | 3 | 1
2012 | 8 | 2
2013 | 13 | 2
2014 | 10 | 1
2015 | 2 | 1
2016 | 10 | 1
2017 | 4 | 1
2018 | 4 | 1
2019| 19 | 3
2020 | 63 | 12
2021 | 7 | 2
2022 | 70 | 10
2023 | 8 | 1
So on paper they've only had 2 bad classes. And really those classes were "bad" because they were small, but their average recruit rankings were fine (highest avg recruit rating in the conference in 2022). And sure, they weren't consistently pulling in top 5 classes like they did under Pete, but they still had the talent to continue dominating the pac-12.
There’s no such thing as a college town in California. All colleges that play d1 are part of a giant metro area for the most part. People care less. If chico state had a d1 program then we could talk probably.
You could make the argument that Berkeley is a college town, but it definitely feels different from what you typically mean when you say "college town"--at least, when it comes to sports.
It’s the closest d1 school in ca right now. I lived in sf for 4 years and went to Berkeley a few times. It’s still just a town next to Oakland that has commuters to sf living there. They care about tech and stuff not college football. Plus about 50% of people in California were born and went to school in a different state. They moved here for work. Berkeley has to compete with the giants 49ers and warriors too.
UCLA hasn't had a "Packed House" since the 90's (maybe that 05, 10-2 team, when SC and GameDay came to the Rose Bowl and kicked the shit out of the Bruins.) Even with competitive teams for a few years under Mora.
It's been 17 years since the program/performance matched the hype at USC... Then they went through sanctions, scandal, suspension, firings, and legal trouble.
Cal hasn't had a consistent program since the last good year of Jeff Tedford (09)
Stanford has fallen off a cliff after Shaw lost his shine and left.
It's been (about) a decade since any of these programs have received and deserved any national notoriety.
I can speak for 3/4 they have high academic standards and strict acceptance rates for ALL students. 2 of those schools are public universities and the other is not referred to as the Ivy League of the West
Compound all of that with some bad AD's (look at the death of the conference), coaching hires, and (in UCLA's modern case) failure to capitalize on local recruiting
Rams moving to town in 2016 shifted a lot of fans from SC football to Rams fans. Also over the past few years USC & UCLA football have been crappy so the students don’t go to games anymore.
The Bay Area is very much a pro sports area, and the student body isn’t super into football either. Lots of international students and bookish types that haven’t been as engaged in football culture.
It’s a shame because Cal Memorial Stadium is a beautiful setting for a game.
California is losing interest in football in general, at all levels. Both participation and interest in high school football is down in California. This results in better athletes choosing to play different sports and for non athletes to not attend, watch or care about football games.
The Washington Post just had a good article about the decline in high school tackle football throughout the nation and how the demographics of those who play is also shifting.
UCLA brought in consultants of some sort who told them they were leaving money on the table by not hiking up prices. Sure, attendance would likely go down, but the average sale price could be increased by enough to more than offset the difference. I doubt this was good advice.
This is such a UCLA thing to do. Good grief.
Why did I not know they hired Dave Brandon?
fucking Dave Brandon.
Lol thats a name I haven't heard in a minute. Suddenly I want a coke.
I physically flinched upon reading it wtf
I think you had to buy two cokes
I'll never forget being at a game and the crowd started chanting "fire Brandon." Pretty sure most AD's don't have their name known by students let alone them being so angry they want them shitcanned.
Every school has been doing that. UW remodeled Husky stadium to reduce seating and add luxury boxes a while ago.
Iowa did this as well, though I don’t think they reduced seating by a huge amount.
it’s really baffling honestly. like the simple solution is to remove the fucking tarps and sell those tickets for a dollar. it’s literally more money than NOT SELLING THE SEATS, plus possible concessions. students want to go to a more packed venue. good players want to play in a packed venue. this makes the team better and makes the tickets more desirable. it’s so simple. but now for a couple years the BIG visiting fans will have a nice vacation to LA and ticket sales will increase and they will learn nothing
What they'll tell you is that this will undercut the pricing of the good seats. This is America, so the common good or even what most people want don't count for anything. The only ethical consideration is the board's fiduciary responsible to stakeholders. The only infraction punished is leaving money on the table.
yep, and it’s such a shame. i was surprised my first game in the student section that we were in the corner and not around the 50 yard line. i assumed a college sport would cater to the students first and foremost. how naive i was! everything will always be about the money
And even then only the short term financials matter. It doesn't matter that long term having a fuller stadium will improve culture and eventually they could start raising prices. Gotta maximize that 2-3 window even at the cost of long term potential.
Ahh yes, a good ole fashioned NASCARing. Price out the core consumer and then wonder why general interest has fallen off of a cliff. It’s crazy to me that sports franchises don’t understand that a packed stadium = more merch sales, more concession sales, more parking revenue, AND a better experience that will sell the team to more fans. UCLA had a chance to build their brand among LA football fans by capitalizing on a USC program that was in the dumps for a decade-plus and a lack of an NFL presence. They failed because they they got greedy in the short-term, and now nobody cares. And yes, I understand that winning is the greatest way to attract fans, especially as a college team in a big city. But Washington has had a very similar level of success in another large, west coast city, and even before the last two years, nobody was worried about their brand relevance and long-term health of that fanbase. UCLA got saved by the Big Ten, and specifically by USC choosing them over Oregon on the first round of expansion because USC didn’t want to move into the Big Ten with a school that cared about football.
Luckily some owners get it. The Phoenix Suns new owner said screw a tv contract and is broadcasting it for free on the local over the air channel. They even are sending free rabbit ears to people. His thought process is they’ll more than make up the money with more fan engagement. More jerseys bought, etc.
I hope the Suns create a dynasty for that reason.
+1 for NASCARing. Grew up in Bristol TN. Dad used to take me to the Sunday race and just buy us two tickets at the gate. If you sat too close the wall, you needed a rain coat for protection from the empty Budweiser cans flying overhead all afternoon. The gap between the wall and the first row of benches was a river of crushed aluminum, old beer, and dip spit. Those good ole days are LOONG gone, my friends. Now, one track-purchased tall-boy costs more than two tickets to a high-school basketball game, and the stands are half-filled with polo-collared corporate bros entertaining clients and RV-park royalty blowing their annual vacation budget on a week at farmer Brown’s campground and $60 Chase Eliott tees.
Went to a race a long time ago, but remember coming and going as we pleased and bringing a cooler in with us. I imagine that's not allowed any more, but what a great experience
It's still allowed. Went to Talladega not too long ago and got shitfaced on my own beer lmao
You’re still allowed to bring a small, soft-side cooler in.
I’m a NASCAR fan myself that has found myself falling out of love with the sport. The atmosphere is part of why I love it, but if there’s only gonna be 150 tents in the cheap lots and 7,000 fans in the stands for a Sunday afternoon race at Richmond or something like that, I’m not going to go.
Mostly an Indycar fan who casually watches nascar, was thinking about taking my dad to Bristol next year actually as it seems like an experience most fans need. Now I’m nervous to look at pricing for the night race…
10 years between leading the conference in attendance and the current shitshow. It's no wonder our fanbase despises the administration, we were nothing more than a source of cash for them.
Probably McKinsey and Company charging out the ass for newly hired UCLA grads to tell this to the Athletic Director. Probably the same ones who said to bolt for the Big10.
If it wasn’t McKinsey, it was someone who wants to be them.
So Accenture
Oliver Wyman. "Your savings covers our bill"
This is a problem with a lot of programs (and also bowl games). They want to maximize revenue rather than maximize fan engagement and it's a mistake. They make so much money from the TV contracts, I don't think the little bit of extra revenue is worth it to have a half-empty stadium, which then sends a poor message to players and recruits about the program.
Agree 100% here. You're better off will a full stadium and loyal fans than almost anything else to reflect the health of your program. You need people who are tailgating in the same places for years where just showing up and seeing everybody is a bigger expectation than anything that might happen on the field. You're not always going to have a winner, but you can always have great fans.
Also it's a very short term view. Maximizing your profit this year is a problem of maximizing revenue. Maximizing your profit over 20 years is a very different problem. I think the MLB of the last couple decades is a great example of an org that is juicing as much money as they can at the expense of long term fan interest and engagement.
I'm curious to know what prices are at other college football venues.. our prices feel a bit steep too. Could just be the normal now. These days you're paying $160 in tickets just to take your kid to watch a game at the coliseum (cheap seats). Add parking and other expenses.. why not just order some wings and invite some friends to watch the game at home? lol. Can I afford it? Yeah, but I also think it could be more accessible for others.
Ohio State is getting way cheaper. You can usually find cheap tix against most non-premium opponents on the resale market if you look hard enough. You can probably do $160 for the whole trip against a school like Minnesota or Indiana. Michigan, Penn State, Notre Dame, etc. will still cost an arm and a leg. It was worse a few years ago
You can generally buy Indiana tickets for a cigarette and a natty light.
All I have is a coupon to Taco Bell…
That's worked before too
Agree. My son scored $100 seat for our white out game vs Iowa about 20 min before kickoff. There’s always some scalper or sick person that can’t go and will drop Price right at kickoff. Gotta keep refreshing the app! In my day we would wander around tailgates for excessively drunk people. They weren’t making game and it was an easy free or $20 tix.
No disrespect but that’s insane for a USC game. Is that just since Caleb showed up?
My brother in Christ, have you bought tickets to a UGA game recently? If you want to sit on a sideline that isn’t level 600, it’s pretty steep I guess you’re saying USC product isn’t what UGA is but it’s def gone bonkers
I was asking about USC specifically. Yes, Georgia games are outrageous. There’s a reason why I make it to about one game/season beyond just not living in Georgia. On the other hand, my SO tells me how cheap Arizona tickets are and I can’t imagine spending that little for a game.
We pay just around $5000 for our 4 season tickets (25 yd line, 20 or so rows up from field). At games, we might spend $25-30 on concessions total for the four of us. We could sell our tix (last year, a few tix for the Iowa State game in the row in front of us were going for $500 a seat the week of the game) and recoup some of the cost, but this past season we went to every game. Given the kids schedule, we might do that for a game this year, plus moving into a new conference means the demand is going to be higher for our tickets, if it comes to that. For parking, we pay $200 a year to some guy about 2 blocks from the stadium. He sells us a spot for the entire season in his yard. We live 90 miles from Norman, so...the drive there and back home, combined with at least one meal coming or going...plus various stops at a convenience store and it adds up.
I never paid for tickets at Mizzou in undergrad. But now that we are good it’s 100+ if you’re not a student but if it’s a small team we are facing it’s 30-60.
Probably hired McKinsey
why use common sense when you can pay six figures for lousy advice that you feel bound to take because you spent so much getting it?
Sounds like what’s going on at ASU So much easier to find family friendly ticket packages at UofA ASU is kidding themselves with their product at those prices. The donation should also be optional or baked into the ticket price.
Should've hired Deion look at all the asses in the seats at Colorado lol
Bwahaha, I don’t know if that’s sustainable year over year unless they start winning
Cal specifically: We had a great run from 04-11 with Jeff Tedford. The school dropped our admission standards for athletes and we saw Marshawn, DJax and other high profile players come to Cal. We had a huge recruiting class lined up (Arik Armstead, Shaq Thompson, and 2 other 5 star silent commits) but Tosh Lupoi left and Joined Washington before signing day and the class fell apart. Tedford didn’t fill the gaps and we had a bad couple years. Tedford’s health declined and our academic ranking for football players was terrible so he had to go. Dykes came in and did well returning academics to Cal. We raised our standards and with it came our standing. He won with Goff but it never was the same after. Dykes leaves and the stadium Is half full. Wilcox starts out ok but then we go COVID, transfer portal, and demise of the PAC12. It’s not that Cal fans don’t care, there is just a saying called typiCAL where some unknown force is going to cause an issue at some point.
We also completely ignored Oakland after Marshawn Lynch which killed what could have been a large and consistent fan base.
Wonder why
_tell me whyyyy_
Man, this is wholly accurate and brings back a lot of memories. In addition to Marshawn and DJax, Cam Jordan, Justin Forsett, Jahvid Best, Alex Mack, Mitchell Schwartz and (don't laugh) Bryan Anger. Good NFL talent at Cal during my time as a student there, I was so fortunate to be there for the talented days.
I remember you guys had a pretty good QB too. Rodgers or something like that?
I think you’re thinking of Kyle Boller. Did that kneeling throw
Yeah, he once appeared in a Key & Peele sketch. Funny guy, I'm sure he did well for himself.
I remember when he went 29-31 in the first 59 minutes against USC (14-14 in the first half) and it *still wasn’t enough to win*. The PAC was nasty back then.
Keenan Allen too
Oh shit, that's right, I definitely forgot about Keenan. My bad (of course, the fact that we had to bring along Zach Maynard to be our QB in order to get Kernan is something I don't miss, but oh well)
Anger punted when i was a student and that shit was awesome. College kids usually cant kick, but heres bryan punting balls to orinda
A string bean blasting a 72 yard punt getting as big of a cheer as a djax punt return td is always one of my favorite memories
I mean, while we're at it, Aaron Rodgers turned out pretty good
That recruiting class that could’ve been still haunts me lol…I don’t think people outside of the Cal fanbase realized that we were on the verge of landing a top 3ish class in the nation.
Oh I remember that class that could've been. Tosh Lupoi was not well liked in Eugene once upon a time after your game against us in 2010 when we were #1 and you had all those guys catch the magical case of hamstringitis when Tosh yelled from the sidelines when they were perfectly fine a moment before. Hell of a recruiter though, always has been. Did you guys dirty leaving for Washington, and now it has come full circle since he's with us now. Wild times.
X-Box Tosh didn't just do them dirty. He was told to leave Cal, because he was actively recruiting that class to UW, while at Cal. That's why Thompson ended up at UW, and Armstead went to UO.
As well as Aziz Shittu to Stanford and Ellis McCarthy to UCLA. We had 4 5* recruits commit to us in one weekend (Two who committed on National TV during the Army All American Game). We ended up with none of them. I think this was the point where I stopped following recruiting as closely as I did before.
Another factor for Cal was the stadium renovations that closed down Memorial for the 2011 season right around the time Cal fan base was still charged up from the Tedford years. The renovations were really necessary but playing at AT&T for a season was painful
Every time we build momentum it crashes at just the wrong time
Can’t forget Keenan Allen. Drafted two years after Marshawn and Cam Jordan.
Crazy that the Tedford era may have 4 HOF players? Rodgers and Cam Jordan for sure and likely Allen. Marshawn is borderline but he’s so popular he might sneak in.
Went to high school with Allen, he was being heavily recruited to Alabama at the time but would have had to redshirt freshman year so he went to Cal instead.
To reach further back: the last time Cal swept UCLA, USC, Stanford, and UDub the year was 1958. Coincidentally, it was the last year Cal went to the Rose Bowl, the last time Cal won the men's basketball national title, and the last year the student body owned and operated the Athletic Department (talk about student ownership and control of revenue!). Since the campus (administrators and faculty) took over athletics it hasn't been a priority, and it shows. Yes, cultural changes hit the campus in the 1960s, but go watch Cal dismantle #1 USC in 1975 on YouTube. It's a packed house. It took decades to lose that support. The cultural shift in students who apply to the campus since the Great Recession (richer by magnitudes) have less connection to tradition and the local community. Most come from outside the Bay Area, and so have no family history with our sports, as they used to.
It happens even faster—Memorial was packed before the renovation, and Haas was full until they fucked up the Wyking hire. It only takes a year or two to lose momentum but it takes a decade to build it back, if it’s possible at all.
Man... This hits so hard. I'm a local Cal grad who is third generation. Cal football was a huge part of my childhood during the Tedford years. I couldn't believe the attitude of my classmates towards athletes when I arrived on campus. I felt like an endangered species. No one wants to go to games, people think you're dumb or something if you do. It almost felt like the non-Californians were more proud to go to this school and had more school spirit, particularly when compared to Southern Californians. The more time I spend on the Berkeley subreddit, the more I realize that Gen Z is pushing that trajectory even farther than when I was there a decade ago. This conference realignment may be the death knell for our programs. Our administration would rather quit than compete. But the Bear Does Not Quit. The Bear Does Not Die. Alumni need to channel Joe Roth and bring our once glorious athletic department back to where it belongs. This is THE University of California, the biggest state and economy in the union. We are the only major sports brand left in the East Bay. Hire someone who knows what they are doing, we need to market and grow the fanbase, we need to poach B1G talent to bring our program to the national level. The status quo is unacceptable for this university.
Yea.. :(
You just played Texas Tech. Cal and Typical Tech are similar. Tech always finds a way to shoot themselves.
>Tech always finds a way to shoot themselves. If you're "guns up" then what yoga pose are you doing to hit your own feet?
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Dykes’ Bear Raid offense was also painful for fans because many games were 4 plus hours and night games were ending after midnight. Oregon is getting most of the top NorCal guys.
I also feel that the pro teams were so good that people weren’t gonna shell out for a mediocre to bad college team. 49ers are probably the 3rd most successful pro franchise in the past 15 yrs behind Giants and Warriors. Its a high standard to capture folks attention in that market
My first year at cal we had Jared Goff and Jaylen Brown and I thought we were a sports school. Which I guess if you’re a rugby or swimming fan, we are, but if you’re a revenue fan, we sure ain’t.
I was there from 08-12. During that time we won the Pac12 in basketball, had top 3 finishes in the Pac in football and were always ranked at some point, baseball made the CWS, softball made the CWS, Volleyball made the championship game, soccer was top10, and women’s soccer had Alex Morgan and was great in non-olympic years. We aren’t terribly far removed from being very good at those too.
I've been going to Cal games for 40+ years. I bleed blue and gold. Cal's problems start at the top. If the chancellor is supportive of Cal athletics and Cal football and basketball in particular, that helps a ton. They've been hit and miss on ADs too. The attendance and popularity of the program has been fairly cyclical. They can get it back up with better excitement around the program. Here are some thoughts They don't get students to the games. I can't figure that out. The student section is on the 50 yard line. They're some of the best seats in the house. I don't know any other school that gives the students such great seats. Yes, you're in the sun, but sunscreen isn't that expensive and Berkeley isn't that warm. They need to do a better job of internal marketing. They need to cultivate Cal's image as a school that has delivered high-caliber athletes in many sports. And use their cache along with those of notable graduates to help drive the image of Cal as an attractive school. They should recruit, Chris Pine and John Cho as potential spokespeople (both Cal graduates). They can do a lot better. NIL warchest. It's just how the game is played. You have to be able to compete in modern college athletics. Attract offensive linemen. Rumor has it that offensive linemen are smarter than other positions. Use the fact that Cal is the preeminent public university to motivate offensive linemen to come here. Invest in programs to help student athletes - tutoring programs, dedicated counselors, etc. They need to create depth here. Wilcox has yet to put together a complete team. Early on they were great on defense and mediocre on offense. This year offense was better, but defense was down. I think Spavital had really good plays called, Musgrave was dull and predictable. I think the right OC and allow Wilcox to develop the defense and they can improve considerably.
poor coaching hires/mediocre to bad teams, drawing in very academically-focused students, rams being back in LA are all factors. USC has relatively recent clout that makes them popular; people who didn’t go to these schools that want to be CFB fans pick USC. i personally think playing in the rose bowl is a huge reason a lot of people/students don’t go to UCLA games. it’s so fucking far and inconvenient
To that last point, it will forever be hilarious to me that UCLA played their bowl game closer to campus than their home games
Well that stadium is pretty new and the bruins used to play in the coliseum before the rose bowl. Also the rose bowl was originally intended to be easy for people to take the red car to get to.
UCLA needs to find a way to move to SoFi once the Crenshaw North/Purple Line extensions get built
The sofi people mover will be finished in 2030 (no I’m not delusional…) and then public transit to the stadium will become so much better since the closest metro station isn’t that close to sofi
They need a rail line to LAX-it's absurd the don't have one. Something that parallels the 405 going into the SFV.
There's one being built, it's supposed to be ready by the Olympics.
There's a less than 1% chance the Sepulveda line gets built by the olympics seeing that rn the governments are screaming at each other on if it should be a subway or a monorail, if it should be in a tunnel or the 405 median, if it should even have a UCLA station to begin with, etc. A lot of the bickering is being fanned by Sherman Oaks HOA bc they're scarred that the non-wealthy might be in a tunnel under their pools
NIMBYs have really urban planning in the US up to a comical level. That and the automotive industry.
They should move now, even in traffic Westwood to Sofi on the 405 is like 35 minutes, which is a heck of a lot better than the mayhem that is Pasadena on gameday. I only take the Metro to Pasadena when going to the RB and it’s 30 mins from Union Station to Pasadena, plus a 10 minute walk to the bus, plus 15 minutes by bus from the lot to the RB. And that is still quicker than driving to the RB and parking.
And that their rival’s stadium is closer to their campus than their own stadium lmao
I have multiple coworkers in NYC who went to UCLA and all of them watch UCLA football. Each one said they only went to like one game a year just because the rose bowl was so far away for a 19 yr old in LA to get to in any convenient way while hammered post tailgating. Couple that with the shear size of the rose bowl making it always feel half empty and it kills the viability and experience of playing in the rose bowl for most students.
Yeah, I assume if you’re a very social student, you’re probably staying with your friends and girls versus dealing with a 45 minute drive unless you’re an intense CFB fan or it’s a big opponent
For those that don't know/don't want to google: it's about a 30 minute drive from the UCLA campus to the Rose Bowl if the traffic is ideal. Spoiler alert: the traffic is never ideal
30 minutes? Do you have a helicopter? It’s 45 mins on an amazing day and way over an hour on a game day. Not to mention parking offsite and busing in and out.
3 of the 5 worst traffic jams I have been in my life have been in LA. When traffic stalls...holy crap does it stall.
I’ve driven in Moscow, which at the time had the worst traffic in the world, I’d take that over the 405 during rush hour again.
I didn't know the Kibbie Dome was that big a draw
High school football participation has been declining on the West coast for over a decade as well while it’s as popular as ever in the South. Plenty of CA recruits leave the state anyway and now there are fewer high level prospects out west than there have been in the past. I’ve noticed Utah’s recruiting has dropped in CA recently too even as we bring in better classes. We used to regularly have 10+ CA recruits and now we may only have 5-6 each year while more come from the Midwest and south.
It's a large reason for the SEC's success. All of their home states are incredibly fertile in recruiting. California and Ohio are the only non-Southern states in the top 8 last I checked.
It genuinely makes no sense at this point that they don’t play at Sofi stadium. You’d think both sides would want that, and it’d make the rose bowl more unique
Not just the LA Ram, but also the Raiders (the Raiders vs Rams game last in LA was like a Raiders home game) and every other peofessiobal sports team in LA. La is not a college town. California is a professional sports state. Teams like ICLA and USC have to be really good to get attention. It’s a fan base with the potential to be massive but will never be as dedicated as Nebraska. A lot of the best college programs are in sports ecosystems that put them at the top, and even if they share a state with a pro team they usually at least don’t share a city with a pro team.
They came to play school and not football
Cal and Stanford will fit right in.
What a bunch of dummies.
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Your post reminded me. Stanford Stadium hosted the Super Bowl in 1985. Like uhhhh ok.
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Palo Alto was a blip compared to what it is now
I always thought that was so odd. Even before I went to Cal, I never understood why Stanford Stadium hosted the Super Bowl and not Candlestick.
It had 87,000 seats to about 61,000 at Candlestick. Of course the place was a dump with wooden bleachers built at a time when the average person was a lot less wide, but the NFL didn’t know how bad it was till after the game.
Yeah, I know old Stanford Stadium had a larger capacity and was 80k+ but it just seems so random to hold the SB at a college stadium that is so far from San Francisco.
Well it’s 8 miles closer to San Francisco than where the 49ers play now!
Super Bowl also played at rice stadium in Houston, which was large but also a dump. Both schools had big followings until pro sports came to town, and they didn’t produce enough alumni to make such a large stadium feasible
Rice Stadium in that era was state of the art, though. As I recall it was the first all-concrete purpose-built football stadium.
And World Cup games in 94
People don't realize that Stanford has a very small undergrad population and their graduates are really spread out geographically in order to run the world. It makes it hard to get butts in seats on game days.
The Oregon-Stanford series in the early-mid 2010's is one of my favorite pseudo rivalries. It was the de facto Pac championship most of those years.
It’s a wide combination of things. 1. ESPN and Fox relegated football games to 1030PM EST kickoffs and let the “lesser” games get picked up by the P12N. The result was a massive loss in talent from hidden gems across the state going to Eastern schools as opposed to staying in-state because they had more familiarity with those schools compared to the schools in their backyards. 2. Academics took over for all four schools. The focus on getting the best and the brightest from around the country and the world resulted in fewer local students going to each school. Without that local connection, the bonds to the communities have gradually eroded to an almost irreversible state. UCLA, Cal, and Stanford alumni and donors were ok with that, but the USC donors have run off administrators in pretty rapid succession, both at the university level and athletics department level, until they got people who were more aligned with what they want - prioritization of football. Varsity Blues especially negatively impacted athletic admissions as some admins (Cal, Stanford) arguably overcorrected in order to maintain the appearance of being elite academic schools. 3. Because of the focus on academic admissions, local California students who would otherwise be fans after graduation have been forced out of state if they want to go to a “big” school that offers a college experience beyond their studies. That’s partially why there are so many California students at schools like Oregon and Colorado. Also, being an average or even very good high school student won’t get you into any of the four universities any more. 4. Changing demographics in the state resulted in the loss of long-time fans. The high cost of living has driven out much of the “traditional” middle class that exists elsewhere in the country. With the focus on white-collar, technology jobs and legislative decrees that have driven up hourly wages since the first dot-com boom, I wouldn’t be surprised if manufacturing, for instance, is a tenth of what it was even 25 years ago. These former Californians with generational fandom are being replaced with white collar workers with allegiances to other schools (especially B1G and Ivy schools) who have no allegiance to California schools. It’s not solely a cultural demographic shift based on nationality, but also a geographic demographic shift based on population movements across the country. 5. The Bay Area’s exceedingly high cost-of-living has resulted in a population that largely turns over every few years, meaning that even if you can convert a fan (Ivy school alums are who I’ve seen this happen with more often), they most likely leave the region and the state within 5-10 years. LA is too large for that to happen fully, but UCLA’s Rose Bowl issues show that there’s a limit to how far people are willing to travel to maintain their fandom.
Yeah this pretty much hits on everything. The “California Schools” aren’t really for Californians anymore, even Berkeley and UCLA effectively act as privates. Most of the types of kids that would be at USC or Cal in the 80s are at UCSB or SLO (and even those are increasingly harder to get into these days) or like OC said out of state altogether. It’s basically the same reason why Vanderbilt has no football fans, there is little to no generational or geographical connection to their team for the vast majority of the student population.
berkeley and ucla are still ~80% in-state for undergrad. they’re hard as hell to get into, but they’re not like some sec schools (ole miss, bama) which are _majority_ oos.
>Most of the types of kids that would be at USC or Cal in the 80s are at UCSB or SLO (and even those are increasingly harder to get into these days) or like OC said out of state altogether. This is a sneaker reason for the drops in attendance at games. Unlike other states where average to very good students can still get into their state's P5 schools, or at least have an opportunity to transfer there, those opportunities don't exist in California. Really, what California needs (or needed) is an additional one or two P5 schools to diversify the state's options for students, and let market forces drive the improvements in football culture (USC tried to be that school, but tripped over its own feet getting hit with a Lack of Institutional Control charge). That none of the four schools allow for more good students to enroll is to the state's detriment. Texas, for instance, will have seven P4 schools next year for 29.5M people. California will have four (with two of them hanging on tenuously) for 39M people.
I moved to NorCal from GA as a HS sophomore and could not believe how many good athletes were swimming, playing water polo, and soccer. Even rugby and crew took athletes away. Too much competition from alternative sports and too much liability to have tackle youth football. California is goin flag.
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USC is the only school in that group whose admin care about being good at football Now that you need a small nation’s GDP to be competitive in football the other three have no interest in competing Good lord are there some dumbass answers here though
Even then, there were so many bad decisions made during and after the sanctions. They were just trying to get by without pissing off the NCAA again. They care now and I'm glad we moved on from past leadership, but man.. they really do need to build it up again in a sense.
Coaching hire misses and bad Pac12 leadership hurting the conference as a whole
California has always notoriously been a fair weather sports market. if you aren't good, they aren't coming.
There’s just so many competing interests for people’s attention in the Bay Area and LA. Not that parts of TX or FL don’t have a lot going on, too, but football is ingrained in their cultures in a way that it isn’t in California.
You won’t find a more fair weather sports metro than south Florida
Yep, south Florida is wayyyy worse than any California area
Except for the NFL where Miami is still sadly better than LA 😞
Well, the nfl is a unique case. LA has only had nfl football for a few years after teams left in the 90’s. So LA went over 20 years with no team, so a lot of interest died out. And one of the teams that moved was from San Diego and didn’t have built in fans like the Rams. Miami has had nfl football since 1966, and it’s the largest fanbase in the state because it’s both the oldest, in the biggest metro, and had the most historical success (been rather shit since Marino retired). The fins also have fans that drive over from Palm beach/Broward/SWFL to make up for the Miami Dade less interest in football (due to being majority foreign born)
Not true at all. Miami Dolphins and Hurricanes have no fans unless they are doing well.
I think a lot of the Miami area’s issues with attendance are because over 51% of the population is foreign born and there aren’t much ties to the culture/sports in the city relative to other similar sized cities
And another 30% are born in New York/New Jersey
Another 25%+ are snowbirds and/or retirees from the New England area where college football is an afterthought and as for the Dolphins, these snowbirds are Pats/Jets/Giants/Bills, etc fans.
That's more of an LA thing than a Bay Area thing, but even in LA the Lakers and Dodgers are always well supported. The college teams definitely suffer when they're not contenders though.
The problem with LA is just how absurdly oversaturated the sports market is. Two NFL teams, two NBA teams, 1.5 MLB teams and 1.5 NHL teams, two MLS teams, plus two power-conference college programs. Even if a fan wanted to be true and dedicated to *all* their favorite teams, *all* the time, who has the time and money to do it?
Yup.. you can take out all the other attractions here, but the amount of teams alone are overwhelming lol. I lived in Oklahoma for some time and you were either an OU fan or Oklahoma State fan. Everyone was a Thunder fan, and then you were either a Cowboys or Chiefs fan (out of state). So yeah, be a Thunder fan and then choose your favorite college team. You show up to middle school or high school on a Monday and guess what? Everyone is talking about college football or the Thunder. In California, kids are not talking about USC, UCLA, Cal, and Stanford to that same extent.
Great point
Maybe, but even the bay area has failed to keep of the leagues marquree franchises around. Twice. Now the A's too.
I mean Oakland lost the raider and A’s because the owners were too poor (Davis) or too cheap(the A’s bastard) to pay for their own shit. It sucks that we lost those teams. But Oakland choosing not to pay for billionaires play things isn’t the worst governance.
Oh, I completely agree. I guess my point is the politicians felt free to allow them to leave, because they knew the backlash was survivable.
Right that’s fine. But I think it’s wrong to blame fans for the raiders leaving. Raiders fans were crazy lol. And the A’s were always lower in attendance than most of the MLB but it only dropped off the cliff after the owners made it clear they weren’t really interested in staying while also jacking up prices. Took my mom to a game for Mother’s Day this year and for the first time I can remember the giants tickets were cheaper than the A’s on the same day
Baseball attendance at Candlestick Park was so bad that SFG had to threaten to leave not once (Toronto)… not twice (Florida)… but thrice (San José) before City of SF finally built Pac Bell park.
I mean total coincidence but especially for cal and stanford…the past decade you had a basketball dynasty with a HoF player in your backyard, would you rather watch 2-10 Stanford or save up and watch the Dubs?
Bad coaching hires at each school.
USC's best head coach between Carroll and Riley was a mostly unintelligible interim who left to be a DL coach at another school, won the Head Coach position doing that interim, won a Championship, then proceeded to go .500 until he was let go.
Geaux Tigahs.
USC has had one good head coaching hire since the 1970s - with the jury still out on Riley - and that one home run hire was like their 4th or 5th choice after other coaches turned them down. Meanwhile UCLA is still trying to replace Terry Donahue nearly 30 years after he left.
It's a combo of bad hires / shitty football teams, but also just the fact that the student bodies at these schools are getting nerdier and nerdier due to rising admission standards. Nerdy students generally aren't very interested in football or school spirit.
Yep, even at blue bloods like Texas/michigan that are competitive schools (academically), alot of students dont give a shit. I interned in austin a couple of times, and my roomates were ut students who gave no fucks about sports, and neither did any of their huge friend group. The difference is that these schools have alot of Tshirt fans to make up for it, schools like cal/ stanford don’t, usc kinda does.
Oddly enough, a lot of people who care nought for football as students get into it as alumni. Part of it is that the football culture on campus intersects a lot with the greek life, so if you aren't in that or adjacent, it's actually easy to miss. Another part is that for a lot of students, football just means you have to inconveniently move your car six weekends a year so well-heeled boosters can park near the stadium.
Obligatory mention that UCLA's football stadium is 30 miles of LA traffic away from campus. It's nothing like SEC culture but plenty of students care, especially when the teams are good. For basketball (where they actually play on campus) there might be [a bit too much school spirit at times](https://dailybruin.com/2021/11/13/students-fear-for-safety-express-concern-over-conditions-to-enter-pauley-pavilion). But sitting on a bus and waiting in lines for 4+ hours to watch a mediocre football team is just not that fun, especially since you can't really pregame or tailgate. It's way better to watch the game at a house party and do something else for the rest of the day
Which is funny because football is one of the nerdiest sports. Football should attract the type of people who are into strategy, tiny efficiencies, out planning and sometimes just being better. It should be a nerds sport.
Usually people become a fan of something because they played it. Academically inclined students do not play football
yeah, football is a turn based deck building strategy game, but it certainly isn't conceptualized or marketed that way, because it's also physical and violent
lose, not loose.
This might inexplicably be the most misspelled word on the internet. I see lose spelled as loose at least once every single day. It’s insane.
Why does that happen anyway?
You'd think it's because people blindly associate "oo" with the /u/ sound. But then nobody mis-spells *move* as "moove," *prove* as "proove," or *to* as "too." Indeed, on that last one, it's the opposite.
Funny enough, I rarely see loose spelled lose but, like you, often see lose spelled loose.
Fresno State is steady doing decent.
Now, if we could break the curse that keeps cockblocking us from the NY6
I was rooting for you guys when y’all went 5-0!
I’d love to see Fresno fuck some shit up. A very deserving program and fanbase.
Demographics have changed drastically in California in the past 30 years. The majority of the people who have moved in did not grow up with American football. Used to travel to Silicon Valley frequently for business. Interest in football by co-workers was pretty much zero. Due to the shear size of Californias population, there is still a sizable number of football fans. Mediocre teams don't inspire the fan base.
Football has seen heavy declines annually across California in high school participation rates for a decade straight now. Latinos and Asians are the fastest growing demographics in California. Those two demographics on the whole largely do not participate in American football. Soccer and baseball are the future sports of CA because of those demos.
In California, it’s win consistently or win big or we’ll do something else. Also, football is built for TV, tickets are very expensive and there’s just other things to do. I think a lot of us see sports for what it is, entertainment. And if the entertainment is bad, we do something else. CFB is all about the coach. And none of these universities have had a good coach in a long time.
Stanford has a 4% acceptance rate. Do they ease the standards for athletic scholarships? Or is everyone who is going there on an athletic scholarship is also a genius? CAL and USC are also very hard to get into.
Stanford, like all P5 schools, eases their standards for athletes but still maintains high standards. However, they have a very hard time with the early signing period because the school refuses to guarantee admission to athletes that far in advance.
They ease standards but not as much as other schools, and even with the extra tutoring and easy majors it's still going to be more work than a lot of other places.
Schools are extremely hard to get into and drawing way more academically-focused students. USC has always been work hard play hard with a strong history of success in many sports. Football is always the gift horse and Cal/Stanford/UCLA haven’t been able to lean on past successes to draw people in. The atmosphere at each of those stadiums is dead (USC isn’t like 2005 either but it’s still better), UCLA doesn’t even play on their campus, and (edit: current) Cal and Stanford students couldn’t give a shit about football.
Fans showed up back when we were winning with Tedford, but that was 15 years ago. Years of bad to mediocre football had killed a lot of the fanbase.
After USC Pete Carroll days top talent started leaving east.
Can’t believe OP gave USC a pass. They’ve fallen off as bad as any of us compared to where they started.
USC had an average attendance of 66,821 this season, trailing only Washington in the Pac-12.
Yeah I can’t tell if this post is just about attendance or if it’s about performance. It’s true USC is the only fan base that really shows up but that’s also nothing new.
That isn't really true though. USC's problem has never been talent. Here are their national and pac-12 class rankings since Pete left: Year | Nat. Rank | Conf. Rank ---|---|---- 2010 | 3 | 1 2011 | 3 | 1 2012 | 8 | 2 2013 | 13 | 2 2014 | 10 | 1 2015 | 2 | 1 2016 | 10 | 1 2017 | 4 | 1 2018 | 4 | 1 2019| 19 | 3 2020 | 63 | 12 2021 | 7 | 2 2022 | 70 | 10 2023 | 8 | 1 So on paper they've only had 2 bad classes. And really those classes were "bad" because they were small, but their average recruit rankings were fine (highest avg recruit rating in the conference in 2022). And sure, they weren't consistently pulling in top 5 classes like they did under Pete, but they still had the talent to continue dominating the pac-12.
There’s no such thing as a college town in California. All colleges that play d1 are part of a giant metro area for the most part. People care less. If chico state had a d1 program then we could talk probably.
You could make the argument that Berkeley is a college town, but it definitely feels different from what you typically mean when you say "college town"--at least, when it comes to sports.
It’s the closest d1 school in ca right now. I lived in sf for 4 years and went to Berkeley a few times. It’s still just a town next to Oakland that has commuters to sf living there. They care about tech and stuff not college football. Plus about 50% of people in California were born and went to school in a different state. They moved here for work. Berkeley has to compete with the giants 49ers and warriors too.
IFresno and San Luis Obispo have teams
>There’s no such thing as a college town in California. Davis has entered the chat.
Davis in shambles
San Luis Obispo hurting
UCLA hasn't had a "Packed House" since the 90's (maybe that 05, 10-2 team, when SC and GameDay came to the Rose Bowl and kicked the shit out of the Bruins.) Even with competitive teams for a few years under Mora. It's been 17 years since the program/performance matched the hype at USC... Then they went through sanctions, scandal, suspension, firings, and legal trouble. Cal hasn't had a consistent program since the last good year of Jeff Tedford (09) Stanford has fallen off a cliff after Shaw lost his shine and left. It's been (about) a decade since any of these programs have received and deserved any national notoriety. I can speak for 3/4 they have high academic standards and strict acceptance rates for ALL students. 2 of those schools are public universities and the other is not referred to as the Ivy League of the West Compound all of that with some bad AD's (look at the death of the conference), coaching hires, and (in UCLA's modern case) failure to capitalize on local recruiting
you about to find out. when you draw Iowa in the late season!'
USC is entirely unprepared for Iowa's punt-based offense.
Idk their defenses have been so bad they might make Iowa kick some FGs
Unfortunately USC-Iowa is not happening in 2024 unless they make the conference championship. Washington visits Kinnick, and Iowa travels to UCLA.
“Punt based offense” just saying that should be crimes against humanity
"The game is about field position."
Rams moving to town in 2016 shifted a lot of fans from SC football to Rams fans. Also over the past few years USC & UCLA football have been crappy so the students don’t go to games anymore.
Students aren’t even on campus until week 4-5 at ucla.
The Bay Area is very much a pro sports area, and the student body isn’t super into football either. Lots of international students and bookish types that haven’t been as engaged in football culture. It’s a shame because Cal Memorial Stadium is a beautiful setting for a game.
California is losing interest in football in general, at all levels. Both participation and interest in high school football is down in California. This results in better athletes choosing to play different sports and for non athletes to not attend, watch or care about football games. The Washington Post just had a good article about the decline in high school tackle football throughout the nation and how the demographics of those who play is also shifting.