Nebraska football and the supposed attendance problems
The college football world has seen a drop in attendance. Those attendance problems include the Nebraska football team but there could be an uptick.
The talk around college football the last few days has been a drop in attendance numbers. While some would like to think that the Nebraska football program is immune, it turns out that’s not really true.
People point to the sellout streak as the end of the conversation. The truth is a bit more complicated.
Yes, the Huskers still have their sellout streak going. What is clear is that there are people who are buying tickets but never actually showing up.
While some will claim there’s not a problem as long as people do indeed pay the money, it can be a sign of bigger things coming down the pike. The World-Herald recently did a deep dive of the attendance numbers and those numbers are a bit disturbing.
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While the Cornhuskers sold more than 90,000 tickets for games against Ohio State, Northwestern, and Iowa that’s not close to what showed up. It turns out fewer than 70,000 people actually went to those games.
That’s a level of apathy that had to be scaring the athletic department. Perhaps even more than the record.
The good news is that Scott Frost is here now. There is going to be a great deal of excitement surrounding the program … at least for a while.
The question now is, what if Frost and company can’t get the turnaround done? How long until the apathy comes back.
If the Huskers cannot turn the program into one that is winning 10, 11 or 12 games a season, then when the apathy returns, does the program still sell out seats? The knee jerk reaction is “of course.”
The sellout streak is a point of pride for Nebraska football fans. The problem is that the price of those tickets is a sticking point.
Because the sellout streak has gone as long as it has, the University has never had to adjust prices to meet a flagging demand. In essence, Husker fans are hurting their wallets in order to be able to say they have this decades long sellout streak.
If the Nebraska football team doesn’t get turned around quickly, the price of seats might mean that we’re going to be seeing more empty seats quicker than normal. After the empty seats start showing up, people not willing to pay could be close behind.