MeanGreenWithEnvy

This past football season was my first one spent actively checking in on GMG pretty much every day. I love the community here, but there was one aspect of the 2011 season that was a nad-kicking in every one of the home game discussions...attendance. What I'm proposing is a series of topics here on what we can do to increase attendance. Forget about the would and the could and the should...we all pretty much dumped our opinions on one another enough last Fall. I know that you can't have this discussion without some opinions being involved, but what I'd like to do is try to keep it focused more on the reality that attendance isn't where we would like it to be and what realistic measures can be taken to address that issue. I'd like to focus the discussion on three areas: steps that can be taken to increase student attendance, steps that can be taken to increase alumni attendance, and steps that can be taken to increase attendance from Denton and the nearby North Texas community (think Little Elm, Keller, Lewisville, etc.). I'd like to steer clear of the dead-end canards like "the Sun Belt sucks" and "we need to play more home/home series with Big 12 teams" and "UTSA is more baller than we are." There's nothing any of us other than RV and the university leadership can do about those things; figuring out some ideas that we could implement with whatever we have to work with is my goal. I'll kick off the three post series tomorrow with some ideas for increasing student attendance. This post has been promoted to an article

I don't know how long we have until today's Wikipedia front page content changes, but a fellow UNT alum just pointed out to me that our very own Lance Dunbar gets some front page love from Wikipedia on today's front page! As soon as I can shrink my screencap down to 20K, I'll upload it for posterity's sake.

This is a bit off topic but still related for this thread, but maybe we could look at playing more regional body bag games. If we're going to get slaughtered, let's get slaughtered in places were we can drive! There's plenty of opportunities: LSU (looking forward to the tailgating next year!), OU, Ok State, and even Colorado State and Colorado. There are lots of Texas kids in those schools, and I'd say every place on that short list is a hell of a lot of fun with the exception of Norman, but I'm biased. I know it's not as easy as coming up with a list and picking up the phone and making it happen, but I'd still love to see more regional bodybag games.

I think if we could make the same gate money off SFA and Sam Houston that we make off the Alabamas, LSUs, and Kansas States of the world, we would gladly do so. That ain't happening, though. As much as it sucks, we need the money from those body bag games.

This is the hardest part of the equation to solve. It's the hardest part to solve because, in my opinion, your time in college as a student is where you cement your allegiance to your alma mater's football team and other athletic teams. Once you graduate, your evolution as a football fan is pretty much complete. From there on out, it's about your college football team and your local (or acquired) pro team. It's going to be an uphill battle to fire up alums who never grew that attachment to the Mean Green while they were in college. I'm not saying it can't be done, simply that it's going to be tough. I think it starts with winning. One thing I've come around to thinking about the UNT fan base this season is that no one outside us hard core folks are going to show up for anything less than a winning team. Merely being competitive isn't going to cut it. We need to establish a winning tradition here and I think Coach Mac and his folks are doing that. Yeah, there will be folks who will say "but we won under Dickey and people still didn't come." I think it will be different now because of the Apogee Advantage. We won under Dickey and people didn't flock to Fouts regularly because Fouts was a dump. It was like going to a college football game in a 3A stadium in West Texas. No casual fan is going to go for that and, like it or not, that is what who we're trying to woo here: casual fans that we wish were hard core fans. I like your idea of reaching out to alumni with free tickets or 2-for-1 tickets. Don't just send them information on how to buy tickets; put the tickets in their hands. I'd strongly suggest the AD do some serious direct marketing to UNT alums living in the Metroplex and Texoma regions. I know alums in both regions who would come to a game if given tickets or a 2-for-1 deal, and these are folks who, for the most part, don't donate to the university and have little to no connection to the wider UNT community since they graduated. This could be a great way to get them back here, get them into Apogee, and get them at a game experience. I've been very impressed with Apogee and the game experience and I think it sells itself better than any of us can sell it. UNT, whether it's the university or a college or a department, is always asking for money from alums. Why not pleasantly surprise alums and give those disconnected a reason to come back?

UTSA will do well attendance-wise because they're the only game in town in San Antonio. The closest college football team to San Antonio is Texas State up the road in San Marcos. UTSA has that whole city...the eighth largest in the U.S...all to themselves. It seems like there's a certain segment of folks on here who are dead set on comparing apples and oranges when it comes to what they think our attendance ought to be versus the empirical reality of our situation. Yes, we're the fourth largest public university in Texas by enrollment. I'd venture that we also have the largest percentage of commuter students of any public university in Texas (Houston might give us a run for our money here). So, we may be the fourth largest public university, but we don't have he fourth largest public university enrollment living in Denton. We're essentially a suburban commuter university (35,754 Fall 2011). If you're going to compare our athletic attendance to other universities, compare it to universities that are like us: Texas State (34,114 Fall 2011), UT Arlington (33,449 Fall 2011), and Houston (39,820 Fall 2011). In my opinion, Texas State is the most comparable; like UNT, it's essentially a suburban commuter university even though San Marcos is no more a suburb of Austin than Denton is of Dallas. It's very close to us in enrollment and, though not as much of a commuter school as UNT, it still has a strong commuter contingent. Our attendance is better than Texas State's. They're FCS and their stadium isn't new and shiny and awesome like ours, but our attendance is better. In my estimation, the big problem is that there's no model for doing what we're trying to do here. I proposed an equation earlier in another thread, but that's simply something that I cobbled together out of observation. We didn't just build a new stadium to add more seats to accommodate more fans. We rarely ever filled our old stadium, a place where we had capacity to burn more times than not. We built a newer, bigger stadium to try to lure more fans with the new stadium factor in the short run and give us room to grow attendance under the expectation that as we become more successful in the long run that more fans would show up. I think that's the solid, conservative model we've created that we're working from, and I think it's a good one. If I had access to game-by-game attendance demographic numbers, I could build you as good a model of attendance as you will find anywhere. What kind of student shows up to games? I'd wager more freshmen and sophomores than juniors and seniors. Why? The freshmen never knew anything of Dodge Ball and the sophomores were only subject to half a season of it. Who comes to one or two games versus who comes to every game and why every game versus why only one or two? Focus group a random sample of each group and find out. Use those findings to inform policy. We can figure this out, but right now we're sailing in uncharted waters. The one thing I'd implore folks around here to think about, though, is stop and consider who you're comparing our attendance to before you do it. Yes, UTSA draws more people. That's because our situation isn't comparable to theirs. Apples and oranges.

The Hilltoppers' defense locked FIU's offense down. WKU's success, lucky or earned, can be crudely boiled down to two factors: establishing the run and their defense showing up. Kawaun Jakes is not a QB who will beat you throwing the ball. Bobby Rainey will absolutely beat you running the ball. WKU's defense is damned good against the pass, hence how they managed to stifle Hilton and Times. They can be run upon, though. So, keep them from establishing the run and, at the same time, establish the run on them.

See if you can get three or four teams of cheerleaders and Scrappy set up with tables in front of Kerr, West, Maple, and give away whatever you can find Mean Green themed...those little nerf footballs, bumper stickers, keychains, whatever, and have tickets on hand to give to students who want to come to the game. In fact, it might be a good idea for the AD to consider setting up a table outside each of the dining halls or in the lobby of each of the dorms on campus where students can pick up tickets. Take the tickets to them instead of making them come pick up the tickets. Do this early in the week and get tickets into their hands so that they make plans to go to the game early on instead of leaving it for later in the week when plans have already been made. The reason I say focus on the students in the dorms and not students overall are because these are the students that you know live here and that you know live in close proximity to the stadium. These are the folks you ought to be trying your best to get to Apogee.

As a tangent, how about the parity in the Belt this year? It's like the Republican Presidential primary...a team to beat emerges for couple of weeks, then is displaced by another team to beat. 100% agree with Harry; after watching Ark State's last two games (by the time the season is over, I will have had one month subscriptions to every one of our away game Sun Belt competitors' streaming services), our D is going to have to play another aggressive game for us to have a shot at upsetting Ark State. It can be done, and I've got to think that they're riding an emotional high after beating the Hawks like they did.

Got to meet some of his family at the FIU game. There's a lot of football in that family!

Think of your core demographic for UNT athletics. Then think of the opposite. That's the Occupy folks.

This, this, and more this. I don't get the fixation that some folks here have with tailgaters, particularly with Greek tailgaters. I hate beating this point to death, but y'all need to realize this past weekend was Homecoming. A whole lot of organizations, Greek and otherwise (like mine), have their Homecoming tailgate as the centerpiece of their Homecoming activity. It's the one time of the year a lot of folks get together. Having the university police chasing the alumni who care enough to come back to visit with their friends out of the tailgate areas on Homecoming is beyond stupid. It's clown shoes and an absolute P.R. disaster. You want to guarantee that the crappy attitudes towards the football program and athletics in general among alums continue? Then by all means go ahead and have police run alums off school property during Homecoming. We should be doing everything we can to encourage people to come to the game for positive reasons. This isn't the 19th century British Royal Navy; we don't need to be dragooning people into their seats. Our tailgate shut down during the game and we all went in and enjoyed the best Homecoming game I've seen in years. Our folks from Honduras and our folks from Austin and those of us who are local had a great time. When we play more games like that one, people will want to come in. That ought to be the goal, not trying to figure out every way possible to run tailgaters off.

This is a very good point. Just like folks tended to fixate on "The Rangers Effect" in the FAU game attendance without factoring in the far more important issue of the weather that evening, I think the folks complaining about all the frats tailgating during yesterday's game are forgetting that this is Homecoming. HOMECOMING. I'd bet a lot of folks on The Hill during the game were alums back for Homecoming. Let them enjoy Homecoming. I don't see anything positive coming out of running alumni out of tailgating. At some point folks need to realize that the best way we put butts in seats is by playing more football like we played yesterday. Stop trying to find ways to shanghai people into the stadium. As the recently-departed Al Davis famously said, "just win, baby!"

I have a hard time believing this is a five-page-long discussion. How could people be upset about students taking to the field after the game? Now that we're finally looking beyond the circus of shame we've had the last few years, now students are excited and energized and into the game and the team and folks are really going to argue that this makes us look small time? It makes us look too much like high school? Let me let you in on a couple of things that make us look far more small time than having revved up students taking to the field after the game: 11-49 9-31 Those top numbers are our overall record from 2006-2010. Those bottom numbers are our Sun Belt record from 2006-2010. When you're coming off an entire generation's worth of college students who knew nothing but 9-31 in one of the worst athletic conferences in FBS, is it any wonder students get excited about every win?

Just got done watching video on Monroe this year (paid a month's subscription to their Warhawk On Demand or whatever it is), and I think that this game is going to hinge on their defense. They're not big size-wise, but they swarm the ball and are excellent tacklers. Like most other weeks, so goes the running game, so goes our game plan. I think their D leaves them exceptionally vulnerable to play action, but in order to have legit play action, we need to run. Establish the run: UNT 27 ULM 24 Don't establish the run: UNT 17 ULM 28

I was one of the folks thinking FIU could go undefeated after watching them in person in Miami. There's more parity in the Belt than I believed.

If you want the flexibility to move your start times around, make them all TBA until the week of or two weeks before or whatever. Don't set your kickoff time months in advance and then change it the week of. That's not cool. I expect the Rangers to be perennial playoff contenders for the next 2-4 years. How about we plan accordingly and have 4:00pm starts for all UNT home games in October 2012, October 2013, October 2014, and October 2015? It's not that those of us who have been put out by the time change can't handle a 4:00opm kickoff. In fact, some folks here on the board seem to prefer a 4:00pm kickoff to a 6:00pm kickoff. Maybe having more 4:00pm kickoffs would something we could do to get more commuters into Apogee. I'm fine with 4:00pm kickoffs. What I'm not fine with is having any kickoff changed at the last minute, particularly Homecoming kickoff. So, going forward, either TBA your October home kickoff times or make them all 4:00pm. Problem solved.

I read a couple of articles on this that cite the Detroit Pistons' crowd/Ron Artest meltdown in the NBA as the reason why showing controversial replays in the stadium isn't done. If that's true, that's incredibly weak. Now I'm off to try to find that rule!

I know different conferences have different rules on showing replays, but I wasn't aware that there was a specific NCAA rule against showing replays in stadium. Hmmmm. Now I'm going to see if I can dig up that rule or rules.

At one point in recent memory, most NFL and FBS stadiums would show replays of all the most recent plays on the field, including the controversial plays that the refs got wrong. Same thing in MLB. It seems, though, that there's been a trend in both the professional and collegiate ranks to not show the most recent plays on jumbotrons/video walls/whatnot, particularly when it comes to controversial plays. You can see the the cultural impact that showing those plays has on folks when you see 3/4 of the crowd instinctively turn their heads in unison to look at the replay on a controversial play, except these days we don't seem to be getting those replays like we used to. I've seen commentary from university officials (not ours) and league officials (not ours) that seems to indicate that this is being done for reasons like "not showing up the officials". When I hear statements like this, I automatically think "so you don't want to give the fans in the stands the full experience they deserve because you're more interested in covering up someone's mistakes?" I would really like to see UNT lead the way in bringing replays back to their rightful place in the stadium. It's ridiculous to not show all the recent plays; showing only some and not others smacks of covering up the controversial ones. Show all of them. It's broken that I can sit at home paying nothing and see replays, controversial and routine, yet if I pay money to go to the game I am denied that same opportunity. The fans paying to come to the game should get every bit as much of the experience as the fan sitting at home. In my best Russell Crow voice...Replay now. Replay tomorrow. Replay forever!

The dismal FAU attendance was primarily weather-related. No storms that night and we would have had a respectable crowd. The only solution...and I mean THE. ONLY. SOLUTION. for our attendance is going to be winning. Winning at home. Winning on the road. Winning. Winning. Winning. Students living on campus and even students commuting from the Metroplex will come out in fair weather and foul weather to see us play against schools they've never heard of if we win. Sometimes I don't think some of y'all realize how many of our students are commuter students. Getting commuters to the stadium is only going to happen one way: Win. Students aren't going to drive 30+ miles to watch bad football. It's no more complicated than that and I think Coach Mac understands that. People make plans based on the idea that an event is going to start at a certain time. When those plans involve traveling for hours (like this thread's owner) or getting a group of people together who are scattered all over the world (like we're doing), people have every right to be upset about kickoff being changed. We made our plans according to the posted kickoff time and now we're being penalized for it. That's not cool. I would still think this was a bad idea to change kickoff the week of the game if this was just Western Kentucky or Middle Tennessee, but it's not. It's Homecoming. It's the one time of the year a lot of folks come back here to visit old friends and kick back and enjoy the camaraderie. The only game that would be worse to do this would have been the Houston game. We will do the best we can with what we have and we'll be in the stadium yelling for the Mean Green louder than anyone else, but the fact remains that we shouldn't have to "do the best we can" on Homecoming Weekend.

If moving the kickoff up two hours gets us 5000 more "everyday fans" I'll streak the halftime show. There's no way we get 5000 more "everyday fans". None. Zilch. Nada. A couple hundred? That's possible. Most folks, be they those of us here on GMG or the whatever these "everyday fans" you speak of, made up their minds about this trade off a long time ago. They were either already going to go to Homecoming or they were already going to go watch the Rangers. All moving kickoff up does is screw up Homecoming tailgating for those of us who chose the Mean Green over the Rangers. Like I wrote earlier, I'm not a fan of this move and it irritates me, but we'll cope. I simply wish that the decision hadn't been made to make those of us who chose the Mean Green "cope" for Homecoming.

Mark me down as irritated as well. Yes, it's the Rangers and yes it's the World Series. People have already made their choices when it comes to Homecoming versus the Rangers game. What this does do is inconvenience those of us who chose the Mean Green over the Rangers. We'll make it all work, but moving your kickoff time up and cutting into tailgating the week of your Homecoming game isn't cool.

The lack of any regional rivalries is part of the problem, but that's not going to get any better for us anytime soon. As overplayed as the meme is, winning is our best tool to get people motivated to come out and watch us play against schools they have never heard of and will never visit. and I don't know if this has been discussed in the past or not, but I'd really like to see the Athletic Department and the City get together on some promotional programs. The City was smart to make the play for O.U. fans this weekend; there's no reason that a city-Mean Green partnership couldn't be equally as smart, especially given that so many of our alums live in the D/FW region.