I am amazed at how any suggestion that the Texas program should be a leader on and off the field degenerates into accusations disloyalty and ill motives.
Just a couple of snippets, not about UT football, not about SEC football, but about college football in general:
Declining student attendance is an illness that has been spreading for years nationwide. But now it has hit the Southeastern Conference, home to college football's best teams and supposedly its most fervent fans, giving athletics officials reason to fret about future ticket sales and fundraising.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304795804579097223907738780
College football attendance stabilized in 2013, but the overall average across FBS schools still was the second lowest since 2003.
All home, neutral-site and bowl games averaged 45,671 fans this past season, an increase of less than 1 percent over the average of 45,440 in 2012. Still, the slight uptick stopped the bleeding for college football, which has seen its attendance steadily decline since a plateau was reached in 2007.
Nowhere is fan behavior more curious than at Florida State, a school steeped in football tradition whose team just completed a national championship run and an undefeated season.
http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2014/02/17/Colleges/Attendance.aspx
ESPN.com approached some of the biggest college football programs and asked them to volunteer their ticket data. How many tickets did programs sell? How many students actually showed up? And why didn't students feel like showing up?
"We have to solve this because we are talking about the season ticket-holders of tomorrow," said Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione. "But interests and attitudes are changing so rapidly it's not easy to quickly identify what we need to do."
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Not only did Michigan have more no-shows, they also only sold 19,850 student season tickets, about a 10 percent drop from the year before.
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Missing one out of every fifth student who bought a ticket has become pretty common these days. Michigan State has sold out its 13,500 student tickets since 2007, but the school says its no-show rate for home games this year still was about 20 percent. That's for a season in which the Spartans went 13-1, won the Big Ten title and ended the season with a victory over Stanford in the Rose Bowl.
http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/10458047/next-generation-ticket-holder-concern-students-show-college-football-games
National Champion Florida State, Michigan, Oklahoma, Michigan State, Georgia, Arizona, Iowa, Georgia Tech, Arkansas, Texas Tech, Nebraska as well as all FBS programs as a group. All looking for reasons why the next generation of fans aren't connecting the way they used to with watching college football live at the stadium. And the fans in the best seats who are getting all the amenities they request are laughing when the fans in the "cheap" seats who are being increasingly alienated (as if any seat is "cheap" and as we have been told, one of Patterson's biggest priorities is to ensure prices are going up), are saying "Once we go 12-1, all our problems will be solved."
Yes, Steve Patterson hired Mickey Mouse to find the answer that no other athletic director has yet discovered. Problematically, those fans with the greatest voice, the 30,000 Steve Patterson pays attention to, aren't concerned in the least at demographic trends and aren't willing to help solve the problem because they are getting theirs. As one individual recently said, "When I am sitting in my seat and enjoying MY beer, I will be thinking of you." To which my response was "While you are enjoying your beer, count the empty seats."
This isn't about beer. Only simple minded people will distill what has been recognized as a national trend down to such a minor issue. The program needs to quit being so focused on laying prostrate at the feet of the 30,000 "special people" and needs to start worrying about the marginal fan that needs to be convinced to do what increasing numbers of fans at UT and across the nation are not doing and that is show up early, make noise and stay late.
If last year's national champion is suffering attendance issues in spite of the fact they are located in just as big of a hotbed of college football as UT, what makes anyone truly think going 12-1 is going to save UT from the same inevitable fate?