so- saw Ryan Leaf talk about USC and I think he may have a point- he says he thinks big city college football programs might not ever be able to sustain. LA there is just too much to do. Same thing with Miami. These programs are after thoughts to the people who live in these cities. He thinks college football is all about the small towns where everyone is all-in all the time.
Ehh... I'm not sure I entirely buy it. Texas would be a potential counterpoint there, given that Austin is a pretty sizable town (if not exactly "big city"), state capitol, etc.
I think part of it might be school size. UT-Austin enrolls ~40K undergrads and ~10K grad students. USC is ~20K/8K. Miami is ~11K/7K.
This is important for two reasons:
- Having a large, captive, student population on campus fills seats on Saturday. You're not going to get all of them, of course, but let's say you get 50%. Half of 50K is a lot more seats filled than half of 28K or half of 18K.
- Having a large enrollment means that you have a LOT more alumni than schools with smaller enrollments. Thus if you only get 5-10% of the alumni regularly following the teams and/or attending games, that's a MUCH bigger group for a school with larger enrollment.
I think there's something to it, of course. When the football team is
literally the only game in town, you probably tend to see a lot fewer fairweather fans. They're coming to the game when the team sucks, and coming to the game when the team is good, because watching bad football on a fall Saturday is at least an event.
That is harder to sustain fan engagement in a big city
when the team sucks. In SoCal, for example, there were TONS of USC fans around during the Pete Carroll era, and they're not wearing Trojan gear now that USC sucks. But you see USC or Miami catch a little resurgence, and all of a sudden those fans will be all-in again.
