With the eyes of the Buckeye State scheduled for screen time Saturday afternoon—when second-ranked Ohio State plays at No. 3 Michigan on FOX—Kent State’s ticketing director Andrew Hammond is crossing his fingers that a decent crowd will still show up for the Golden Flashes’ final home game.
“Decent,” of course, is a relative term when it comes to football attendance at Kent State, currently the worst team of the habitually worst-attended major college football league, the Mid-American Conference.
Kent State’s season finale last year against Eastern Michigan drew an official crowd of less than 4,000 people; Hammond doesn’t begrudge those who didn’t show up on that below-freezing Wednesday night.
“As much as I love football, I would certainly not mind being home in 70-degree weather with a warm cup of soup,” he said. “We try to make it as much of a fun environment to help drive the sales.”
Kent State is currently 1-10, set to close out this season against 5-6 Northern Illinois. The Golden Flashes are averaging 10,532 fans per home game and, barring a miracle, will finish well below last year’s average of 13,354—which was eighth-worst in the NCAA’s Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).
Last year, five of the eight lowest-spectated schools in FBS were members of the MAC, which in 2014 signed a $100 million media rights extension with ESPN. Core to that deal, which carries through the 2026-27 season, was the league’s willingness to have its schools play most of their November home games on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, offering what was once a unique slate of midweek college football broadcasts for ESPN and its affiliates.
Arguably, the arrangement recast MAC venues like Kent State’s 25,319-seat Dix Stadium into Disney sound stages. In exchange for further burdening their aging and apathetic fan bases, MAC schools receive annual distributions of between $800,000 and $1 million in ESPN money.
“It is a balance of having a unique time slot that has become almost iconic,” said MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher. “It has helped build a national brand for the conference and its membership. You do have to work hard in terms of moving tickets, but as we have seen, when there are compelling matchups, compelling games, I think we have people who have been successful.”
Kent State hosted two midweek conference games this year, the latter being a loss to 6-5 Bowling Green on what turned out to be an unexpectedly balmy Wednesday evening. The announced attendance was 6,065, despite it being the annual Freeze Out night, in which students who attended the game received a complimentary stadium blanket. (Students are admitted to games for free, as about a third of the general tuition fees go toward intercollegiate athletics.)
According to Hammond, it was the season’s far and away best walk-up crowd, to boot.
If there’s an overall silver lining to the Golden Flashes’s tarnished 2023, it is that the school will have again sold more football tickets than its spitting-distance rival, Akron, which heads into its home finale Friday averaging 7,508.
For Akron athletic director Charles Guthrie, it’s time for his and other similarly situated MAC schools to stop fighting and start embracing their televised fates. That means using tarps, not blankets.
“Our next plan needs to focus on making our stadiums look TV-ready, looking at the camera side,” Guthrie said. He points to the way NBA arenas were retrofitted for the fan-free COVID season in 2020-21 as a model for how MAC schools should be thinking about their nationally televised football games. “There are a lot of things we can do that won’t cost a lot of money that will fix the perception of our games not having attendance,” he said.
Even at the conference’s stalwart program, Toledo, which is 10-1 and ranked No. 23 in the country, there have been plenty of empty seats to be found. The Rockets averaged 19,928 fans in their six home contests this season, and never once hit Glass Bowl Stadium’s capacity of 26,248.
Steinbrecher says he’s open to “new thoughts and different visions” but doesn’t want his members to throw in the towel on attendance.
“I think we are all concerned about what the game presentation looks like on (TV), and if there are creative ways we can make sure we are putting the best picture forward, I want to do that,” he said. “But at the end of the day we need to start with the nuts and bolts and fundamental stuff. Let’s get the best product on the field and do neat things to market the product.”
How much longer beyond 2027 the MAC can milk midweek TV money is an open question. Recently, other leagues like the Sun Belt and Conference USA—which originated the midweek TV game concept back in the early 2000s, when Mike Slive was commissioner—are part of the workday fray. (ESPN has broadcast Thursday college football games since the early 1990s.)
“Now what we see is a saturation,” Guthrie said. “All good things come to an end, and you have to constantly reinvent yourself to stay relevant.”
Steinbrecher, however, notes that along with increased competition are a slew of new telecast partner prospects, including from the digital space.
Back in the spring, Hammond said he got a call from his counterpart at C-USA member Louisiana Tech, soliciting advice for the tricks of selling tickets on those less-than-ideal calendar slots.
The known knowns are challenging enough, but then there are the known unknowns: To accommodate the needs of ESPN and CBS Sports (which sublicenses 12 football MACtion games a year), many of the contests do not have confirmed start times until a few weeks, if not just days, before they are played.
“That is my personal frustration, how at the mercy we are to the networks,” Hammond said.
For Kent State, however, the financial trade-off seems like a no-brainer. Last year, the university finished dead last among FBS public institutions in football ticket revenue, taking in just $146,620. Akron finished second-worst, taking in $214,630. (By contrast, Ohio State led all of college football with $47.6 million in ticket sales.)
When he took the job in 2021, Hammond said Kent State’s ticket prices were “a lot lower than I felt comfortable with.” For example, a single season ticket for five home games cost $45, something Hammond felt was “tough to take in.” This year, the cheapest season ticket was $60. The school has also adopted a dynamic pricing strategy, where individual tickets for the November midweek games are $15 while the weekend matchups go between $20 to $25. Hammond says he and the school have been gradually trying to bring their prices in line with the MAC average season ticket price of $113.
Employing a “positive outlook for a historic challenge,” Hammond says the midweek games, if nothing else, “give us a chance to experiment.” Success in this realm is measured in smatterings.
Last month, Kent State ran a “BUY Week” promotion, selling $8 tickets to the Nov. 8 Bowling Green game, which included a voucher for a free hotdog.
“Food seems to move the needle,” said Hammond. The end result was about 50 tickets sold.
“Some people may not think that means much, but for us it is proof of concept, so that is good data for us to have,” Hammond said.
Hammond has been pitching the idea of bringing in a portable outdoor hut tub for a game, not unlike what Toledo did with its “Touchdown Tank,” a few weeks back.
“We like to have just some fun brainstorm sessions, more as a way to blow off steam, but I think really there is no such thing as a bad idea,” Hammond said. He plans to broach it again in the offseason.
Akron’s Guthrie, however, is also looking for “outside-the-box” solutions that may well be outside the stadium—or the state. Guthrie told Sportico he thinks the MAC should consider playing some of its midweek conference games in Sun Belt states like Florida, where many of its older fans and alumni have retired to.
If nothing else, it won’t be freezing.
(This story has been updated in the second-to-last paragraph to clarify that Guthrie was talking about midweek conference games being played in Sun Belt states.)
"crowd" - Google News
November 24, 2023 at 12:02PM
https://ift.tt/CN4Fo89
Crowd-Starved MAC Foes Kent State, Akron Tackle Attendance Woes - Sportico
"crowd" - Google News
https://ift.tt/8o6anSk
https://ift.tt/VEaib3l
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Crowd-Starved MAC Foes Kent State, Akron Tackle Attendance Woes - Sportico"
Post a Comment