Wall Street Journal: Schools have no idea what students want at CFB games

quote:

---

The most powerful people in college football are desperate to figure out what the millennials on their campuses actually want.

They thought they knew. To stop the puzzling decline of student attendance at football games, schools across the country have taken numerous steps in recent years. The most radical was upgrading cellular reception and installing wireless networks around their stadiums—a multimillion-dollar endeavor for a service that may only be used a handful of times each year.

Now, though, schools have more data than ever on their fans and especially their student fans. That new information has them rewriting their old theories. Their most startling finding challenges the one thing they thought they knew about today’s 18-to-22-year-olds: It turns out that students may not want to be on their phones all game long.

The most recent support for this surprising result comes from a new survey by the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators and Oregon’s sports marketing center. It asked almost 24,000 students across the country to rank the factors that influenced their decision to attend games. By far the most important was a student’s interest in that sport. By far the least important was a stadium’s cellular reception or wireless capability.

The study is so counterintuitive that it seems like it must be an outlier—except that it is supported by similar polls in places where college football is massively popular.

At Michigan, when the student government asked undergraduates why they go to football games, what they found clashed with conventional wisdom: Michigan’s students simply didn’t care that much about mobile connectivity. In-game Wi-Fi wasn’t as essential as lower ticket prices or better seat locations. Among the seven possible improvements to the game-day experience, in fact, students ranked cell reception last.

One of the shocking things that schools have learned is that football fans, including students, currently care more about clean restrooms than fast Internet. In the recently released Oregon study, which surveyed students across all five power conferences, fans ranked cellular connectivity last on their wish list.

“The nuts and bolts,” Stricklin said. “They still want the basics.”

Today’s fans seem interested in the same amenities that have always interested football fans. At Ole Miss, one of the first schools to survey its supporters, Rebels fans said before last season that mobile web, apps and email access were the three least important of 53 elements of a live game, according to the school’s summary of the study. Last year, though, Ole Miss installed a new wireless network in its football stadium for about $5 million, in part because students said cellular reception was a priority, athletic director Ross Bjork said.

“I don’t think it’s on the forefront of the broad fan base yet,” he said. “The key is preparing for the future. We know this is going to be a part of the fan experience, and we know fans will continue to evolve.”

---