Why is BYU Football Attendance Down a Bit This Year?

Interesting read hear from Jay Drew of the Salt Lake Tribune on diminished attendance at BYU games thus far. I think all the points he makes are accurate. Though he doesn’t discuss it a lot, he mentions the fact we all want to be on our phones and social media during the games, which is tough to do inside Lavell Edwards Stadium.

BYU football: Cougs unbeaten, ranked, but attendance slipping

I think this a growing deterrent to attending live football games. Not sure about you, but I love to sit down to watch a Cougie game and text my buddies and relatives scattered all over the country during the game. I’ve also recently started following the games on Twitter which is very entertaining.

You simply can’t do that at the stadium. You can’t get the Internet inside Lavell Edwards Stadium. You can’t text either. Perhaps, that’s a good thing – maybe we should unplug a bit more and go watch a ball game and yell and cheer with our buddies, kids or grand kids – and not worry about the phone. However, that way of watching games is slowly going away.

We’d rather stay home and watch on our high-def TV’s, stay warm, eat better food at 1/10 the cost, see every replay, listen to the analysis (it’s hard to watch 22 moving parts – baseball and basketball are easier to follow in person – so we really depend on the football announcers to help us understand what’s going on). Additionally, college football Saturdays are an event and we want to keep an eye on all the other games. If they would start outfitting all the stadiums to give us the high tech experience we want, perhaps there may not be a drop off at all.