Tickets sold maybe, but they had multiple games in recent years with plenty of empty seats, including the conference title game they hosted where it was like half full.
WSU attendance in the past four years
- Thread starter Flatlandcoug
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Tickets sold maybe, but they had multiple games in recent years with plenty of empty seats, including the conference title game they hosted where it was like half full.
Tickets sold is all we care about. The points above about Boise State are valid and they are why we would be stupid to go for a 50,000 or 60,000 seat stadium anytime soon. It's why my initial post said that we should be shooting for the 38,000 seat range for any expansion we do now. I think we have the potential to use 42,500 to 45,000 seat range but I don't harbor any delusions that should be too soon.
I think it's worth bearing in mind the capacities of some other Pac-12 schools, all of which are in much, much better positions from the perspectives of local population, lodging, and proximity of main alumni bases:
Oregon State: 45,670 (in context of local population 2x or 3x that of Pullman and 80 minute drive from Portland, mainly on an interstate highway)
Stanford: 50,000 (decreased in relatively recent renovations from a massive 85,000 or 90,000-seat stadium, as I recall, reflecting modern attendance realities and an emphasis on a manageable size, despite being in a huge metro area)
Arizona: 57,400 (in metro area of 1 million and only 100 minute drive from Phoenix)
Utah: 45,000 (in middle of metro area of 1.2 million)
None of this is to argue against a modest expansion to something like 40,000, which I acknowledged before could be a reasonable idea, and with you expressing something similar. Doing so isn't crazy and I think there's some value to having a stadium that seats at least 40,000 to be more consistent with Power 5 norms.
I still think it is difficult to extrapolate from Boise State too heavily, though, or any other situation where the hyperlocal (i.e., in the same city) population is larger. If WSU was in Spokane, I think a 45,000-seat stadium, if not larger, easily would make sense. Corvallis is the closest comparison we have to Pullman in the conference, and even it is better situated. Most of its fans are likely local, in Portland, or somewhere else on the I-5 corridor, and -- admittedly without looking -- I'm sure there's much more lodging available. Probably relatively few having to drive over from Bend or other areas in eastern Oregon. In WSU's case, nearly everyone is having to drive at least for 90 minutes or 2 hours, if not more, mainly on 2-lane highways that are pretty dangerous in the winter. It makes direct comparisons with most other places tough. Some college towns in the midwest and south may look like decent comparisons on paper, and they perhaps should be, but I think we also have to acknowledge the reality that culture is a bit different out west than it is in those regions.
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Agree on your thoughts overall....but wanted to add a few counterpoints.
1) Stanford is in the bay area with pro football, pro basketball, another Pac-12 team, and a multitude of other distractions. That, combined with a fanbase that prides itself in not caring at all makes Stanford a difficult team to compare with.
2) The state of Arizona is loaded with transplants from other states with other loyalties. Also, it has a large hispanic population with no particular loyalty to American football.
3) Utah shares its metro population with BYU as well as pro teams.
4) Good point about OSU but their relatively close proximity to Eugune means that they compete for the same fans as well.
The one beauty about Pullman being so remote is that we don't have a "local" college football program (or other pro teams) that we have to share fans with. That's not true in basketball and we've all seen the t-shirt fanbase that Gonzaga has developed. The geographic and population challenges that WSU faces are real, but we aren't trying to find 45,000 fans to come to our stadium anyway. We have 12,000 students and around 6,000 local fans we draw without trying. There's another 6,000 fans that come to games no matter what. That's how we end up with 23k to 24k on our bad games. The question is how to make another 20,000 fans want to be in Pullman. Leach is proving that he can keep us competitive on a regular basis and that's enough to fill our current stadium half the time and over 90% tickets sold in 21 out of 27 games. We obviously need that to continue if this discussion is to be relevant.
Not only would an oversized stadium be impractical in Pullman, it would look ridiculous. The modern stadium trend is for quality over capacity, even in the NFL. Martin Stadim needs to be renovated more than it does expanded. Improved common areas, concessions, restroom upgrades, some type of cover over the seating. Seating capacity doesn’t need to be over 50K. In fact, 45K sounds ideal.
Our fans travel their asses off to attend games in Pullman. Make the experience the best you possibly can. Convenient parking, awesome tailgating, leveled RV parking lots, great concessions, etc. A beautiful 45K season stadium will marry perfectly with the FOB and new IPF.
Our fans travel their asses off to attend games in Pullman. Make the experience the best you possibly can. Convenient parking, awesome tailgating, leveled RV parking lots, great concessions, etc. A beautiful 45K season stadium will marry perfectly with the FOB and new IPF.
The problem with the growth in Tri-Cities and the SEL Pullman influx is that all of those people come from somewhere else and bring their own allegiances. If they care about college football at all, they already have a team. A big part of the Tri-Cities people, and presumably the majority of those coming to SEL, are college educated, so have a pretty natural loyalty already. Second problem, particularly in Tri-Cities, is the proportion of the newcomers who are at the other end of the spectrum - Hispanic/Latinos who couldn’t care less about football. Convincing either of those populations to drive 250 miles RT 6-7 times per year, dropping a couple grand along the way, is a tall order. Especially given the near complete absence of WSU marketing effort in Tri-Cities.
Regardless of the demographics, I have a hard time justifying a stadium expansion when we don’t consistently sell the seats we have. Add to that the fact that the community lodging and food options are limiting, and I have a hard time seeing how we can even consider going past 40K, maybe 42.
I agree that that 40-45K is probably the max that would ever make sense in Pullman but with marketing and consistent winning football would support that. Like you say, the SEL guy from Chicago can now watch his alma mater on the Big10 network whereas 10 years ago he may have been tempted to wander over to Martin to catch a Cougs vs Cal game.
There is REAL truth to this. There are models all over the nation to support this, across all sports. It's all about quality, not quantity. Don't shove a bunch of money into seats that will never be sat in. No need for a 60K+ stadium. But throw that money into stuff that will make the game day experience the "best in the west". And then all that money can go towards the experience for the players, as well. EDIT: Oregon comes to mind regarding this model.
But here's my caveat to this concept... Then we need to make sure the next 10-15K seats are PREMIUM. End zone seats do not make sense in this model. Add luxury seating and a modest addition of "regular" seats to the East side and we'll be at that magic number. I don't see a need for end zone seats, in any model that makes sense. It's cheap money going after cheap return. What we need to do is go after the lunchpail people and luxury. Better rate of return. Especially when we continue to have success. Demand will start jacking those prices up.
Another caveat. We need to solve our "we sold the tickets but we don't have butts in the seats" problem before we go much further. While it's great that they are sold, it's still an indication of demand. And apparently we don't have enough demand for those seats to sell them 2nd hand, to fill. That's a real problem that needs to be solved before expansion.
The AD now has a re-sale option through Vivid Seats. I have not used it, but I understand it's pretty easy. Of course, it will only help put butts in seats if there is demand for tickets.
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Flat,
Small disagreement relevant to sharing fans. The closest city to Pullman is Moscow, which also has a university and football team, so we lose potential fans to the Vandals. I am sure we also lose some fans from Lewiston to UI. Yes, neither city is huge, but it all adds up.
Another problem that WSU has drawing fans is the increasing prevalence of night games. I know the issue of hotel rooms has been brought up, but the need for rooms is worsened by all the night games. With games at 1-2:00 in the afternoon, it is reasonable for fans across the east side and even over to Puget sound to make a game with a long day of driving. With games getting over at 10:00 PM to midnight this is not reasonable or safe for the vast majority of people. Even living by Coeur d'Alene I sometimes get home between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. Brutal!
We definitely share fans with Idaho and that's why I said that we should only be expecting 6,000 "local" fans to show up, some of which are faculty and other support staff for the university. I'm going to pull some numbers out of the air, but I'd guess that our current "sold out" games in the 33,000 range have a distribution like below (values in parenthesis are percentage of regional population assumed):
WSU students: 12,000 (60%)
Pullman/Colfax: 2,500 (5%)
Moscow: 1,800 (5%) - this number might be high?
Lewiston/Clarkston: 1,200 (2%)
Spokane/CdA: 6,500 (1%)
Tri-Cities: 2,500 (1%)
Remaining Eastern Washington: 2,500 (0.25%)
Puget Sound: 4,000 (0.08%)
Total: 33,000
To get to 42,000, we need to get the following bumps:
WSU students: 13,000 (65%)
Pullman/Colfax: 3,500 (7%)
Moscow: 2,200 (6%)
Lewiston/Clarkston: 1,800 (3%)
Spokane/CdA: 8,500 (1.3%)
Tri-Cities: 3,500 (1.3%)
Remaining Eastern Washington: 3,500 (0.35%)
Puget Sound: 6,000 (0.08%)
Total: 42,000
The question for WSU on filling up a 42,000 seat stadium, is where do you put the extra 3,000 - 4,000 fans that don't want to drive back to Seattle or other remote locations after a game? Or does WSU need to not plan on growing the fanbase from longer distances and need to figure out how to get 2% of the people in the Spokane metro area to come to a game? Breaking it down into areas shows that it doesn't take huge numbers from any one area but also starts to highlight the problem with comparing Pullman to Boise for attendance that was mentioned earlier.
On the night games......yeah......that's a real problem and WSU needs to work with the networks on. I've driven from Pullman to Spokane where I've left town at 11 pm and got into Spokane closer to 1 am than I'd like because of traffic. Night games will be a drag on WSU's ability to fill a larger stadium. We've also just got to accept that any game scheduled after November 7th that's not the Apple Cup is likely to have poor attendance.
Realizing these are very soft numbers, I think you're giving Tri-Cities too much credit. The amount of traffic I see before and after games doesn't suggest a high attendance from here. Maybe there are more early arriving RVs, which I don't have much perspective on. But I find that there's a tremendous drop in traffic when turning from 26 to 260. Sometimes I'm the only car on the road. There's also quite a bit of traffic that turns south at Dusty, so there's a Pomeroy/Dayton/Walla Walla county contingent that is probably larger than the one from Tri-Cities.
The buses are a bit of an untapped resource, in my opinion. They consistently fill up even with advertising basically limited to word-of-mouth. If WSU itself would actually put some effort into those they could make some gains. That's probably talking hundreds of people, not thousands, but for a reasonably low resource investment...and it circumvents at least in part the issues with the night games and lack of lodging. I've ridden the bus a handful of times - mostly for the night games - and it's really nice to be able to sit back and snooze a bit while someone else does the driving. Makes about a 30-minute difference in what time I get home, but for the convenience it's hard to beat. Plus, when it's just me, the $30 bus ride is roughly a break-even with what I would spend in gas driving myself.
From a highly unscientific look at the stands, I also question whether we're getting 12,000 students consistently. That would pretty much mean filling the student section every week, and we don't. COnsidering the modest increases we're chasing, I think the marketing effort needs to focus on Pullman/Moscow and try to shake loose some of the people who could come pretty easily (including students). A 20% increase in those groups would be a significant chunk. After that, invest in the closest population centers (2 of which have WSU campuses) - Spokane, Walla Walla, and Tri-Cities. Getting those areas to contribute another 10% would start getting close to 40K. Some effort could also be made in Yakima, Wenatchee, Vancouver, and Seattle, but the distance creates diminishing returns - fewer people there are going to be interested in the drive more than once a year.
It's been mentioned here every year, but the biggest splash would likely be improving the game experience - creating more reason for fans to come, regardless of where they're coming from. "CougVille" was a step in that direction, but only a very tentative one, and one they don't put much effort into. More events on campus, BBQ on the mall, wines and brewing, farmer's market. Concerts coinciding with game weekends. There's been a thousand ideas floated, but none have caught on. If we're going to draw people from more than an hour or so away, it's going to be critical to have another way for them to pass the time.
Agree 100% that the students are not filling out their section consistently but my estimates were what it takes to fill the stadium completely to its 33,000 seat capacity. Tri-cities is definitely far enough away that the dropoff could be more significant than my guess. FWIW, it's pretty damned pathetic if WSU doesn't already know what the real distributions are. The AD marketing group should be tracking that information and working on plans on how to maximize the fan support from each area.
Agree that buses are something that WSU needs to continue to collaborate with providers on. Anything to make the experience as pain-free and enjoyable as possible while keeping the price reasonable.
I'm sure that they know where season ticket holders live. Even if it's not right at their fingertips that should be a Kindergarten level query they could run on their database. They can probably also figure out with nearly the same accuracy where the single-game ticket buyers are, at least for those who buy ahead of time. It's the walk-up buyers that will be the least accurate to figure out...although I suspect that WSU's walk-up crowd is probably smaller than what exists on most campuses, and it's probably safe to assume that 75+% of the walk-up is from Moscow-Pullman.
I'd kind of like to see the data for the last 10 years. Where are ticket buyers coming from - broken down by season tickets, single-game purchasers (including those that buy for multiple single-games in a year) - and walk-up. As much as possible, I'd like to cross that with how many actually show up - which should be possible for the handful of years that they've been scanning tickets. Then, look at those numbers related to the typical complaints - weather, back to back games, W-L record, quality opponents, etc. Let that data inform where you really need to spend effort, and create some incentives for the weaker scenarios.
