quo vadis
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I Root For: USF/Georgetown
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RE: attendance by conference
(01-07-2020 11:13 AM)mturn017 Wrote: (01-07-2020 10:36 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (01-06-2020 07:09 PM)Cyniclone Wrote: (01-06-2020 04:25 PM)quo vadis Wrote: (01-06-2020 04:15 PM)Cyniclone Wrote: What in heaven's name does attendance have to do with FBS eligibility? For starters, programs have and will continue to goose numbers by any means necessary to get to whatever number you want, but more to the point, how does tickets distributed or even butts in seats relate to a program's ability to be an FBS member? Optics? If a program can be consistently competitive in a decent stadium and spends an appropriate amount of money relative to its status, who the hell cares if they have 15,000 or 30,000 as an attendance number? It's utterly irrelevant.
To me, it's the most relevant thing. It's a joke to have fully-funded teams playing before nobody, that means the fan base of the school doesn't care so why should anyone else?
If you have no attendance, you are just spending money from somewhere to field an artificial team for who knows why? you might as well just conduct the games on an empty studio lot. Or better yet, to save anyone from getting hurt and on scholarships, just use CGI to simulate a game for XBox or streaming.
I mean, without attendance, what on earth is the point?
There's more than one way to gauge program interest besides the nebulous concept of NCAA-recorded attendance. TV ratings, donations, booster-club memberships. I'm not going to insult you by saying that a school with attendance averages above 100,000 is fundamentally no different than one with averages below 20,000, but that's an effect, not a cause, of a program's strength, and not the primary one.
Ultimately, fans don't win games, they don't boost a school's academic credentials, and their attendance or lack thereof alone won't cause a program to fall below standard. If an FBS program is struggling, it won't *just* be because they don't meet an attendance benchmark. They'll have other issues more pressing, even if it's not as publicly evident.
Attendance is a 'nebulous' concept, but let's face it - to the extent that it is, it is because universities have made it nebulous by coming up with clever ways to cook their books so as to present a better image of the program and to stay technically in compliance with FBS requirements. It doesn't have to be that way, if everyone is honest and third-party auditors tally the numbers.
As for other ways to measure a program, you mentioned TV ratings, donations, and booster members, I seriously doubt that the bottom-level scroungers do well on any of them either, do you? And that's even if we grant their validity.
As for your second statement, true, fans don't win games, but what does winning games matter if it happens before no attendees? What's the point of playing the games? At that point the football team's existence is basically self-referential. Having the team is an end in itself, an absurd situation. Again, might as well play them on an ESPN studio lot with canned applause, or else convert the real football team to an E-team for Playstation 5 or whatever.
What other valid standard for FBS should there be other than real attendance? I just don't see how a program whose attendance overlaps with FCS attendance can claim to be in the same level as ones that average 2x, 3x, 4x the attendance.
Nebulous indeed. How does USF post over 30K in attendance and have less than 3.2M in ticket sales? Our stadium didn't even hold 20K in that year and we had greater ticket revenue and over 3 times the amount of donations as the Bulls. If USF hadn't vaulted into the BE and gotten the TV revenues and later the exit fees they'd be middling to bottom in G5 resources. Your team should be in FCS. The only support evident is coming from TV networks.
You make a good point about ticket sales - you can sell a lot of tickets if you price them very low, effectively subsidizing the sale from other money, that's another way to cook the books.
As for ODU vs USF, are you including sales of all athletic tickets or just football? I'm sure ODU sells a lot more basketball tickets but that's not relevant to a discussion of football program status. If you guys did earn more football ticket revenue than USF, well congratulations.
FWIW, I am not exempting USF from my proposal at all. The 20,000 standard should be the same for everyone and books should be uncooked, audited by third parties. If my Bulls can't meet the standard then yes, we should be dropped down too.
That said, USF plays at a stadium owned by another entity, the Tampa Sports Authority, so IIRC, our "butts in seats" numbers are typically more valid than those of schools that own and thus control their stadiums, because the TSA independently counts attendees at USF games and can report those numbers without USF being able to massage them.
(This post was last modified: 01-07-2020 11:42 AM by quo vadis.)
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