(06-26-2015 02:00 PM)Antarius Wrote: No one avoids HRS because it doesn't have a giant video board, Wifi or fancy seats. They don't show up because they dont care about Rice Football, the random school that we are playing, the horribly inconvenient start times, etc etc
Not disagreeing with the sentiment... but of course 'no one' is too broad. It's obviously a convoluted mix of things...
Students are generally attracted by different things than alums and different from 'fans', and marketing to those groups means different things. No, students probably don't care about wifi, but non-students probably don't care about college rivalries. I suspect students care less about the bathrooms and concessions as well, but maybe not.
The COMMON things that impact the interests of these groups would be the times, our performance and the competition.... which we have little control over (of course, more over our own performance, but you follow).
There is no reason we can't market to all three of those groups... and of course, they all contribute to 'environment'...
but by far the largest room for increasing overall attendance is from people who didn't attend our school... and while those people ABSOLUTELY care about the quality of the game itself, there is NO WAY that we can expect to put on a more compelling quality of game than the multitude of top 25 games that are on EVERY week.
What we CAN offer them is the ability to keep up with that action WHILE they are getting the game day environment from us.
My thought is a bit like the Lucky Strike concept for bowling or the dine-in movies. Like a sports bar, but with live action, tailgating, the Mob etc.
Let's be honest... We can't convince anyone that Rice v UTSA is 'better' than OU/OSU or Ala/Aub... even if we're both good that year and the others are in slumps... but we CAN convince them that a) if they live in the area, they can attend out game for less than $500 and b) that they don't have to miss THAT game in order to catch ours.