Admit less international students.
Only 6% of the undergraduate student body is international. Are all of the other 94% showing up?
That will never happen, but I remember one member who posted something about a program that the Rice football team does with Rice's international student body to try to get them interested in american football.
That's where the problem lies, partially. There are four things you need to focus on to encourage student body attendance at games:
1. Clear Understanding of Value - At least to a degree, athletics do affect academics, reputation, and prestige; however, the vast majority of students do not make this connection and see athletics as a social event. The GTAA needs a program to explain to students how the success of the football team impacts them giving clear and tangible results (higher application rates, leading to lower admission rates, which leads to higher rankings, for example)
2. Role Modelling from Senior Leaders - The GTAA needs a program to get senior leaders involved and actively supporting academics on campus. This includes student leaders like the student body president and academic leaders (like the President of GT). But more so, it involves things like getting some faculty inspired and involved, as well as influential group leaders (ANAK and IFC, in particular). Get Bud to send emails to students on Friday reminding them about the game and trying to create enthusiasm. Make every Friday "Wear Old Gold Day" for both students and alumni so that people see others role modelling the desired behavior, etc.
3. Build an ability to connect with the game - This gets into the Rice comments above (e.g. Football 1101), but it goes beyond the rules of football and gets into explaining to students the history of the sport at Tech. What percentage of the student body knows that Heisman coached at GT? How many know that Bobby Dodd is more than a street? Do people know that we used to be a national powerhouse? Or that we won a national championship in 1990's?
4. Create a reinforcement mechanism - This is the hardest thing to do, but students need to know that supporting the team leads to direct and tangible results. I'm not sure how to do that easily. Discuss the number of applications and how that relates to football team support? That only happens once per year. Look at the ratio of students accepted / students recruited and show how that increases over time? I'm not sure. But there needs to be a tangible feedback mechanism that shows them that as they support GT athletics, the result promised in point 1. is coming true.
Do all 4 of those, tell DRad to be nicer to the existing students, and things will greatly improve. You can't do one or two - you have to tackle all four simultaneously or the culture transformation will fail.
And if DRad ever sent an apology my way, he would have received advice like this for free over the last 5 years.