“Notice the Vikings have no issue.”
I'm not saying no one who goes needs to take precautions or that nothing can happen. I'm saying the # of people actually staying home out of fear is very small. But I see it raised in the top 3 or 4 reasons every time attendance issues are discussed for the Twins or Gophers. I don't believe it is.
Attendance is down everywhere, and it's for the reasons you give. The numbers being down isn't that surprising, actually. The question, however, is how we're doing with respect to our peers and how we're doing when you adjust for our situation. What I mean by that is that the Gophers have a huge built-in advantage: they play in a metro area north of 2.5 million people. Much is made of the local competition for the ticket-buying dollar, and it's no lie, but there's another side to that coin, which is...2.5 million people! That's a lot of potential fans, alums and non alums.
This team is so painful right now you could make every ticket 5 dollars and you still wouldn’t sell out
I really think one thing going on is that so few people even remember how fun it is to have a competitive team in a packed arena. That's why most of the low-patience, high-expectation people on this board are the older ones like me who know how things can be and don't buy the notion that such success is impossible or that it's so hard to win here that we should accept the lower division of the league as our new permanent home. And make no mistake: fan/booster expectations and pressure have a lot to do with the urgency with which athletic departments operate.
It was a better crowd yesterday, but definitely nay. The good thing is the crowd was engaged, and that was because the team gave them a reason to be engaged (by playing better).
Agree with selection Sunday, lower bowl was pretty full though
Well said.
This is reason #1 by a mile.
I don't know to what extent this has affected attendance, but I was thinking about this at the previous game I attended. The game day experience downright sucks. To your point, if I wanted to attend an ear-bleeding hip-hop concert, I'd do that. There's a place for that. But the only place where I can hear a world-class pep band perform is a major-college game. Why aren't we allowed to experience that?
I know people who say that too. But they're people who rarely went anywhere except the airport or the Mall anyway. That is my point. I think for most it's just a different excuse. Before it was "eh, too crowded /too hard to park" now it's "I don't feel safe, Minneapolis is like a war zone."
The demographics of those 8500 is really old. We have done very little to build a new younger fan base since '97. It will take some sustained success to do so. I hope Ben can do it. The window is short.
All it takes is winning. I know plenty of kids through my own kids that are either Badger or Packer fans. Some have ties to WI, some don’t. There’s little mystery why we keep losing kids to WI basketball and to a lesser extent WI football- winning cures all. The Barn, the parking, the boogey-man that is MPLS all cease to become issues when you win consistently. We haven’t done that my entire lifetime, so yeah, of course there’s only old timers left; they’re the only ones that have seen a consistently good product at some point in their lifetime.
Fox News scared them.
100% this. It’s that simple. They are putting out an extremely awful, uninteresting product. If they don’t care to create compelling entertainment, why should anyone care to spend their time and money watching it?
Exactly. It's purely a dollars versus product equation. And the numbers speak for themselves.
Word. I don't know if this is a long-term trend, but it's definitely a thing. We've become a society of homebodies.
That's not going to happen. No TV/Streaming service would carry BTN if they did that. They may make far more off subscriber fees than BTN+ subscriptions.
