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Boy oh boy, do we need a full slate of college football games to start. Immediately, if not sooner.
Despite the LSU Tigers program under Lane Kiffin essentially blowing up the college football model by adding NFL players in order to make their team better and pivotal week one storylines to track, the only topic of discussion around the sport this week has been the attendance at USC’s home opener.
The Trojans hosted San Jose State at the LA Coliseum on Saturday at noon, a game time that made little sense for everyone other than NBC. SC entered the game as 38-point favorites, temperatures were in the mid-90’s with extreme, and unusual, humidity for Southern California, and the kickoff time ensured there’d be no shade or relief from the miserable conditions.
USC FOOTBALL RIPPED FOR PATHETIC CROWD AT HOME OPENER: ‘ABSOLUTELY EMBARRASSING’
Unsurprisingly, many chose to stay home, rationally deciding that they could simply wait for the weather and a more favorable kickoff time to deal with the atrocious LA traffic, elevated parking prices, long walk, and terrible security lines. This has sparked days of outrage and clickbait videos from commentators and analysts in comfortable studios who are certain they’d sit in the heat to watch a full game that was over within 15 minutes. All while ignoring the many examples of other big schools, like the Florida Gators, that have struggled to fill seats for noon games in August.
Now we can add the head coach of the Texas Tech Red Raiders, a program known for its moral character, to the list of complainants.
At a news conference on Monday, Joey Maguire explained, just before taking a shot, that he did not want to “take any shots,” before saying he’s excited to play in front of a sold out crowd in Lubbock this weekend.
“Not to take any shots because I have a lot of respect for USC and Lincoln Riley, but man, it’s really awesome to be playing in Lubbock, Texas, knowing we’re going to be playing front of 60,000, and it’s going to be warm,” he said. “It’s going to be every bit as warm as it was Saturday. The great thing is we got some really tough people in West Texas that love their football and they’re going to show up.”
DOES USC’S POOR OPENING GAME ATTENDANCE MEAN LINCOLN RILEY’S ON THE HOT SEAT ALREADY?
It actually won’t be as warm in Lubbock as it was in LA, with a forecast high of 92 degrees and lower humidity. And the game is at 4 p.m., meaning the sun will be going down behind the stadium by the second half, instead of only getting increasingly hot as the game wears on.
Though, since weather is the topic of conversation in college football right now, it is a credit to fans in Lubbock that they show up to watch their teams in the heat. The problem though? They have no choice.
Most Texas Tech home games in August and September are going to be miserable, because the weather in Lubbock in August and September is miserable. There’s no, “I’ll just go to the next game because it’ll be more comfortable,” because doing so would mean missing half the season. Same with Gainesville, Florida, and most of the South. The weather is objectively awful for two straight months, which means you have little choice but to subject yourself to hell in order to watch the team play.
With USC, by contrast, these outlier heatwaves are pretty easily avoidable. The forecast for Friday night’s game against Fresno State, for example, is 72 degrees. By the end of the game, it’ll be 68. Some fans make the rational decision to simply…go to that game instead, not waste their time to watch 15 minutes of competitive football. Especially when there are multiple events per week that compete for entertainment dollars.
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Fans in other parts of the country have no choice and are used to atrocious conditions, because they live in places with atrocious summer climates. There’s no competition for Texas Tech football in Lubbock, not the NFL, not Major League Baseball, and not Major League Soccer, all of which will have games in LA in the coming weeks.
Should USC’s attendance have been higher? Yeah, absolutely. Did it fill in more after kickoff? Also yes, though obviously well below what it could have been. For those who’ve never been to the Coliseum, it’s in downtown LA, which means horrific traffic trying to get to the USC campus. There’s little parking at the Coliseum, meaning fans are forced into a nightmarish hellscape of distant structures, and the security lines are infamously awful at an old stadium. Late arriving crowds are part of the LA sports experience, even at USC, because getting places in LA is an unpredictable guessing game.
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Oh, and not that it matters to Maguire or to anyone else, for that matter, but there are plenty of good seats available for most Texas Tech home games this year. Yes, week one is sold out, but their game against Arizona has thousands of tickets just waiting for those “tough” fans to snap up. Even their “biggest” home game, against Arizona State, has seats readily available. Lower level tickets are $170, whereas desirable seats for SC’s home game against Oregon in September are $425-$475. For a family of four, that’s nearly $2,000 to go to a game, with parking and stadium concessions.
Maybe that’s part of the problem too, USC’s administration simply pricing their tickets too high for what the market can support. Particularly given the competition in LA and Southern California. USC’s student composition has also changed dramatically in recent decades, as the school now has a shockingly high percentage of international students, thanks to their wealthy donor parents, who have little interest in football.
But nuance, rationality, perspective, and experience are not valuable commodities in college football, however, considering social media dunks are far more exciting and attention grabbing.
