A 2-4 team hosting a 1-5 team will not draw flies. Plus the MAC is second fiddle to Ohio State (lesser note Michigan and Notre Dame), if they’re playing at the same time nobody shows up. Poor attendance already is only made worse with the midweek games. The low attendance wouldn’t be so bad if people felt they could get behind their team and show up all season, but the current system hampers all of that so many just don’t show up at all.
More MAC attendance:
“Teddy Cahill, Ball State Daily News reporter, recently reported that
Eastern Michigan has a provision in their “distribution contract with Pepsi requiring the company to buy $150,000 worth of tickets every year,” which the school counts as 45,000 sold tickets.”
“In 2015, we wrote about the NCAA's football attendance mandate, which requires FBS schools to average at least 15,000 fans per game once every two years. The rule, which was described to us by a longtime former athletic director as "out of date," results in plenty of schools that go to extreme measures to meet the minimum.
Some, as
Akron did in 2013, purchase the tickets themselves, and others sell heavily discounted seats to corporate partners. In 2015, the Zips went the extra mile by sending free season tickets — 9,000 in all — to recent graduates. (Those tactics are all well within the rules, which is one of the reasons the mandate seems silly.)”
And this one was a beauty, Kent State hired a promotional firm to run their 90Ksu drive to get to 90000 tickets for their 6 home games, 15000/game. When they fell woefully short they cut a check to the same promotional firm for $113000 to cover them buying 21000. That firm then gave the tickets away for free. Questions are there of which came first the free ticket or the check, because they couldn’t possibly know how many unsold tickets they’d need bought until after the season yet they claim they bought them up front and handed them out. Funny, I still have my 90Ksu T-shirt and stickers as I bought tickets in that drive thinking it actually meant something, but since then we haven’t heard boo about reaching the 15000 barrier that the NCAA doesn’t enforce. Oh, no the icing on the cake was $10000 in bonuses paid out to the AD for increasing ticket sales that year. The same AD now in the news over the field hockey game being called over fireworks for the football game.
“The NCAA Division I membership requirement (20.9.7.3) mandates that “once every two years on a rolling basis, the institution shall average at least 15,000 in actual attendance or paid attendance for all football home games. In meeting the football attendance requirements of the football bowl subdivision, an institution must undertake an annual certified audit verifying its football attendance.”
In order to meet the NCAA-mandated minimum requirement of averaging 15,000 attendance for home football games, the Kent State football team has sought outside financial help.
A few years ago,
Kent State used more than $113,000 of its own money to reach a paid attendance of just over 90,000. Now in recent years, Kent State’s athletic department has used department money, provided by corporate partners and sponsors, to buy its own tickets to meet this NCAA attendance requirement.”
http://www.kentwired.com/latest_updates/...mode=story
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Since we are FCS for life
