The ghosts of Homecoming past

gambler said:
PENN state is cold and hot from sub .500 several year stretch to .700s in recent years. Michigan was all over the board from 2005 to 2015 but all those schools are still were putting 100k fans in the seats during those years.
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Are you really comparing attendance at midwest/northern areas with little else to do w/GT's situation? Those schools are also the DOMINANT flagship school in the state. The do not compete with any other school within the state for attention. GT's biggest rival is currently at its best over the last 40 years. Michigan nor PSU has to compete with that.

Now, compare GT to other P5 schools that are actually in cities, not college towns.

You are right, that it isn't just winning--other things to do is a big factor as well (in addition to those schools having a significantly higher student population). Additionally the last 5 seasons of mediocre to bad football compound the other problems that have lead to declining attendance.
 
gambler said:
Your logic is busted. Otherwise, it is if you build it, they would come. So get your wallet out and let's crank open a 200k seat stadium. We both know you will still only find 30k in attendance.

I'm glad you brought up Utah. It's just down the road from me and a great comparison for school size. Enrollment, stadium size, and attendance is about the same as Tech. The difference is the demographic. The MUSS (student section club) at Utah is 7000+ and it's consistently capped at membership. The Swarm + Goldfellas + Reck Club + any other club membership that has a seating block at the games is maybe 2500. Hell the band is the second largest student organization at the games.

Those are the ones involved in these homecoming extracurriculars. Not the 40 yr old sidewalk fan who likes when Tech wins. So what this tells you is that our student's participation/enthusiasm as a whole is terrible and that leaks over to support for the football and other teams.
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What logic do you think is busted here? All I said was that he quoted the largest attendances as some kind of proof that "it's the storied history" when the reality is for the schools at that level, it's really just "stadium size." If UGA's stadium held 100K+, they would have been on the highest attendance list. Ditto Oklahoma. So yes, if THEY built it, folks would come. Does NOT mean that applies to Tech or a hundred other FBS schools.

I did not even say one damn thing about Tech, so I am lost where you have conjured up this false idea that I believe that if Tech builds a huge stadium, they will come. Of course they wouldn't. They don't even come close to filling the stadium they have (unless it is visiting fans from Ugag or the Fish-eaters) Even if Tech went 12-0 for three straight years, and had the stadium capacity, they woudn't get that kind of attendance, for a myriad of reasons - some of which you correctly note. However, without the 40 yr old sidewalk fan whose importance you seem to be disparaging, LSU and Bama, for example, are NOT even close to filling those huge stadiums and are not on his "highest yearly attendance" list. If Tech wants to fill BDS, it's not going to do it just with students - it will need a lot of "sidewalk fans."

Meanwhile, Utah's attendance is much greater than Tech's even though the stadium is slightly smaller in capacity than Tech's (51444 vs 55000). For example in Utah's last home game, against Arizona St., the official attendance was 51,724. That was actually more than the official stadium capacity. Announced crowd for Georgia Tech's last home game, versus Pittsburgh . . . 36,383. I read that the attendance in the NIU and KSU games averaged about 34000. And even against UNC (one of Tech's biggest ACC draws) in the Mercedes Benz, the announced crowd was 37450.

That does not look to me like "attendance is about the same."

So who's busted here?

Utah has been winning a lot more than Tech has in recent years. So I think winning is more important for attracting folks to your games than "storied history." Now if you want to bust me for that take, have at it.

Meanwhile, like for almost all of these issues . . . I think he answer is "just win, baby."
 
GT98 said:
Are you really comparing attendance at midwest/northern areas with little else to do w/GT's situation? Those schools are also the DOMINANT flagship school in the state. The do not compete with any other school within the state for attention. GT's biggest rival is currently at its best over the last 40 years. Michigan nor PSU has to compete with that.

Now, compare GT to other P5 schools that are actually in cities, not college towns.

You are right, that it isn't just winning--other things to do is a big factor as well (in addition to those schools having a significantly higher student population). Additionally the last 5 seasons of mediocre to bad football compound the other problems that have lead to declining attendance.
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I'm not sure where you're going with this. Pittsburgh, Temple, Penn State in direct competition. Michigan, Michigan State, any directional Michigan school in direct competition. This is just for football. Other sports are more saturated.

But anyway I think your interpretation is off the original topic. I originally said that society in general is primarily impacting student participation in extracurricular homecoming activities, not necessarily football attendance but it happens to also be affected. Andrew says that lack of winning is primarily the issue. The rest of what you quoted is from one of my rebuttals to show that teams can lose/underperform for periods of time (like we are now) and still manage to have crowds/participation (which we are lacking.) Can't fix the issue unless the problem is identified and that's what we're trying to determine.
 
1982Jacket said:
What logic do you think is busted here? All I said was that he quoted the largest attendances as some kind of proof that "it's the storied history" when the reality is for the schools at that level, it's really just "stadium size." If UGA's stadium held 100K+, they would have been on the highest attendance list. Ditto Oklahoma. So yes, if THEY built it, folks would come. Does NOT mean that applies to Tech or a hundred other FBS schools.

I did not even say one damn thing about Tech, so I am lost where you have conjured up this false idea that I believe that if Tech builds a huge stadium, they will come. Of course they wouldn't. They don't even come close to filling the stadium they have (unless it is visiting fans from Ugag or the Fish-eaters) Even if Tech went 12-0 for three straight years, and had the stadium capacity, they woudn't get that kind of attendance, for a myriad of reasons - some of which you correctly note. However, without the 40 yr old sidewalk fan whose importance you seem to be disparaging, LSU and Bama, for example, are NOT even close to filling those huge stadiums and are not on his "highest yearly attendance" list. If Tech wants to fill BDS, it's not going to do it just with students - it will need a lot of "sidewalk fans."

Meanwhile, Utah's attendance is much greater than Tech's even though the stadium is slightly smaller in capacity than Tech's (51444 vs 55000). For example in Utah's last home game, against Arizona St., the official attendance was 51,724. That was actually more than the official stadium capacity. Announced crowd for Georgia Tech's last home game, versus Pittsburgh . . . 36,383. I read that the attendance in the NIU and KSU games averaged about 34000. And even against UNC (one of Tech's biggest ACC draws) in the Mercedes Benz, the announced crowd was 37450.

That does not look to me like "attendance is about the same."

So who's busted here?

Utah has been winning a lot more than Tech has in recent years. So I think winning is more important for attracting folks to your games than "storied history." Now if you want to bust me for that take, have at it.

Meanwhile, like for almost all of these issues . . . I think he answer is "just win, baby."
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You're making my whole point for me and then in the last sentence disagree with it again haha. I point out the capacities and win rates to show that you don't have to win to fill the seats, then you come back and say that the reason the seats are filled is because the stadiums are big. The size is not at debate, it's the fact that Texas can be terrible for a decade and still have people show up, so we need to find out why we can't do that also.

I'm glad you agree that we can't just build it to bring more people in. But we can increase student attendance at games and it should match schools like Utah, or in my opinion be higher than that because I do believe we have a better history and environment. You pulled a single game sample for attendance, while my source was:

https://collegefootballnews.com/201...attendance-rankings-five-year-biggest-average

Either way, not to split hairs but they are very similar sized schools, similar stadium sizes, similar average game attendance (from my source anyway), but very dissimilar demographic as I already pointed out.

If you think that winning drives attendance at games, well, that puts you in the boat with @andrew but I've offered evidence otherwise. Regardless, students are the ones that make homecoming activities memorable and without that student participation increasing, the activities and the games will continue to suffer.
 
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