There was a fairly entertaining game yesterday, featuring ACC powerhouse Stanford hosting Hawai’i. I enjoyed watching it, as well as the 274 fans in attendance, too.
Oh, that wasn’t the only place. Lincoln Riley and the greatest show on Earth came out to a similar crowd at home.
Is this a sign of a waning national interest in college football, or is this just a California thing?
I also heard it was hot.
It’ll be 96 in Athens this coming weekend and I can assure you all that Sanford will be close to capacity, and “it’s hot and humid” may be the reason why folks opt to leave at halftime, but it won’t look anything like this.
Just remember the ACC and the B1G opted to expand to California for improved media reach and competition, and they’re truly getting neither.
Haven’t they ever heard of blue tarps?
NC State-Va was only 1/4 full Dublin only game close to full
It’s definitely been a distracting offseason, but USC has the most fair-weather fans in the state and Stanford is horrible. Also, I can confirm that the CA sun is very strong and is better consumed near the large body of water nearby.
Californians are not college football fans. They like their local high school football and then it’s professional sports. Does the Coliseum fill up when USC is good? Yes, but that’s to see the USC celebrities on the sidelines, who show up only when the Trojans are good. UCLA in the Rose Bowl is embarrassing … I’m convinced they agreed to cancel the series with us because they knew what we would do to take over Pasadena. Cal is a joke … they had a future Heisman winner and didn’t do squat.
Stanford sucks now. If any school should have prospered in the NIL era, it should have been the Tree with all of their entrepreneurs, doctors and business moguls (including Tiger Woods) showering athletes with dollars (IIRC Tiger’s son is committed currently to Florida State). Maybe when you see the Stanford campus (beautiful), you would understand why.
As the cost of living in California continues to rise forcing people to vote with their feet, this problem is going to get worse. The changing demographics of California is going to kill the sport in the state.
Week zero is the equivalent of dropping the canary into the coal mine. How far can they push fan interest? Yesterday was a success for TV in need of content and Vegas but not much else. Let’s see how the court cases (oh…they are coming) play out this week to further alienate fan interest.
NASCAR ran at Daytona last night (to a less than capacity crowd) only to determine 16 drivers by points who will still race among 40 cars for 8 more weeks that includes some boring non-traditional tracks. The PGA wraps up the season today in a limited field shootout that will likely crown a winner who was not necessarily the “best” all season and have already announced a serious revamp to their playoff model. More ain’t always better but that’s what the leaders keep thinking.
The Tour Championship change a couple of years ago made me think who thought this was a good idea. I didn’t like multiple years where the result of the playoff was decided very early. I also didn’t like when they handicapped the field but gave the leader such a head start that it removed much drama. I like the proposed change for 2028, but match play is so fickle that it’s hard to assess whether that works either.
On week 0, I watched the last quarter of the FSU game while looking my phone and listened to a bit of UNC-TCU on the way home from the golf course. I fear that’s going to be my Saturdays in the not-so-distant future.