MSU had 17000. Even the Dakota’s who have years of success didn’t have tremendous attendance.

Notably we had more fans show up than SD. Someone should show this to Plough.

Here is attendance vs approximate venue capacity. Percentage-wise we are near the median.

UIW 1926/6000 =33%
Mercer 8012/10,000 =80%
SDSU 10376/19000 =55%
NDSU 10373/19000 =55%
USD 6231/9000 =66%
UCD 6317/10000 =60%
Idaho 7346/15000 =50%
Montana St 17000/24000 =71%

There are a lot factors we cannot control especially considering this is a late add to a lot of family calendars—finals, office Christmas party, ballet recitals, Aunt Bethany coming to visit. But reducing friction in ticketing software is one that could be controlled.

Ranting on a post game interview is non-productive because the audience is already high-propensity fans and negativity isn’t great advertising. Imagine a stern Charmin bear chastising a janitor for buying store brand toilet paper and how it was unfair to the bears that stayed up all night quilting that double ply. It would work as a comedy bit, but would get weird if they were serious.

i was just about to do this! thanks. The outliers are Mercer and UIW; everybody else seems to be well below their normal regular season attendence.

considering the basketball crowd was above normal, i wonder if a later start time would have brought out more students (once they finished studying all day for finals)? or, was that a product of a sweet give-away (beanies) and free tickets for football fans?

hard to say. Also throw in variables of an indoor venue, closer proximity to the ARC and dining hall, perceived lower time investment, and possibly easier ticketing. If attendance is something that Athletics really wanted to understand, I’d suggest they use some measurements— for example theme parks often ask every n-th person coming or going a couple survey questions. Perhaps just as interesting is if they had a survey taker at the dining hall during game time to ask passersby why they chose not to go to the game.

Students had to pay to get into the playoff football game, didn't they ? If so, there's a partial answer right there. It doesn't seem like the cost of a discounted student would be that much of an impediment but it could be. Imagine you are told you must now pay to see a sport you weren't passionate about to begin with. Still want to go ?

Basketball admission would have been free for those same students since it was a regular season game.

my understanding is that student tickets were sponsored so the tickets were free to interested students. I don’t know how it was operationalized though.

I was actually looking for info on that to post on reddit the morning of the game and couldn't find it in 3-5 mins. Couldn't tell if it was because the offer was only posted a week ago and already buried in socials, or links/posts were pulled from insta once allotments were filled, etc, or if there was never a dedicated student offer and you just had to grab a free ticket from the same promo code general fans were emailed.

I suspect some students would give up too after about that amount of searching

Oh well, if they had to do something to get the tickets there's a potential problem I don't think if I had to do more than just show up, pay a nominal fee ($1 I think it was), show my reg card that I would've attended any of the football + basketball playoff games as a student.

In any case it wasn't Plough's place to call out people for not attending. Encourage more people to show up: don't criticize them.

With FREE social media, it should have been everywhere:
- ICA Tickets page
- ICA Twitter / Instagram
-The Aggie Twitter / Instagram
- The Davis Enterprise Twitter / Instagram
- UCD Campus Twitter / Instagram
- Gunrock Instagram / Twitter
- outside the CoffeeHouse / Silo / Library
- staggered repeats after a few days

Somehow tracking who commits, so you can gauge follow up options.

Literally no one I know here on campus knew we had free tickets. The only way I got a few friends to go or think about going was getting that link to free tickets from this forum. Also when you look up UC Davis football tickets it comes up with a single page ticket article from the beginning of the season that leads to a link that says “no tickets available” since it’s a link to regular season tickets

^^^ This is exactly what I referred to earlier. We're diehard fans, many students and locals aren't. If this holds for other Undergrads, this is a marketing communications failure.

Is The Aggie still published?

This is par for the course. Plough’s frustration is not simply the attendance on Saturday, but that’s what boiled over. His issue is lackluster attendance AND the smallest donor base in the conference AND the least amount of season tickets sold in the conference outside of Portland State. These are issues that have existed for decades and with a few rare exceptions (Aggie Pack in early 90s) the administration has done little to nothing to promote a connection between FB/BB and the campus community or the local community.

Is there a list of the number of donors and the number of season tickets sold for each school in the conference?

Marketing and Admin. aren't creative when they need to be that's for sure. If Saturday's game had been on ESPN2 I think they would've expended more effort and thought up of clever ways to fill the East stands.

Online only but yes. https://theaggie.org/

cal Aggie is available at like 15 places within campus and in downtown Davis

But they have all of these assistant ADs, associate ADs, various other managers, but they don't do the BASICS. KISS.

Just like - did they survey alums and season ticket holders for a potential charter flight for possible game #2 next weekend? A week or two ago? [Maybe they did.]

They could have given them 2+ weeks to discuss, prepare, and contemplate the South Dakota trip. List the charter cost, 2-3 hotel options, and local sights seeing.

I think that’s it. If you just have to show your student ID and are used to doing that, then hear that’s not the deal - most students likely just mentally checked out.

Just to clarify, for football (and I think basketball too) you already have to do an online checkout process to claim student tickets. They coach students through it at Orientation.

The "show ID" days have pretty much passed for the marquee sports, though frankly bringing that back with a paper ticket allotment to hand out at a table at the MU or something may have been the answer here.

I think the issue overall this weekend might have been confusion/lack of clarity about whether the normal student ticket URL was the one you used, or the general ticketing website using a promo code, or some other student ticket redemption process that us non-students were never pinged about.

Thamks for clarifying. It’s been a while since I was a student. When in grad school at Tennessee, we could just show a student ID. Would get my wife in with another female student’s ID who generally looked nothing like her - but you pretty much just got waved in.

While I don’t disagree that a person or people are making way too much to deliver way too little, here are some ideas for next year—
1. Have the option to opt in to purchase potential playoff tickets at time of season ticket sales, or at least make it a one-click transaction.
2. Host a freshmen-centered tailgate, since they generally don’t have their own cars. If it can’t be free, have it accept the dining hall plan instead of just cash.
3. Bring back Aggie Fanatics / Aggie Bucks. Aggie Fanatics was a program in the late 90s where you got a membership card and scanned it at every game to get giveaways and earn Aggie Bucks, which could be redeemed for swag. Incentivized going to more games, even some of the obscure sports if you were trying to earn.
4. Meet townies where they are. Promote in local elementary schools and at the Farmers Market. Woodstock’s Pizza used to say they were the home of the “5th quarter huddle” and you’d see plenty of players there after the game. I remember walking from Toomey to the Hallmark (then Ramada) Inn that G Street would hopping after a win.
5. Low cost/no cost advertising. Examples- change the default no content projector image in the lecture from the UC logo to a game this Saturday splash screen between classes, insert a message on the Unitrans bus destination boards, put table tent cards in the coffee house and dining halls.

These are so easy and 2-5 were regularly part of the program decades ago when they truly had no money and limited staff. Moving the stadium did impact the connection with the town. Out of sight out of mind.

Battle for the Golden Horseshoe 2007, in which Ramses Barden and co. destroyed us 28-63 in front of 5+ sections of Aggie Pack. I remember that even the stairs between each section were filled. Back then we stood for the whole game so for this game the stairs were just an extension of each section ... meaning you had each row of students going uninterrupted from the current-day visitor section all the way to the Band-Uh! section.

If only we had the 2007 Aggie Pack for the 2024 football team...

dang! Remember that game.

I was one of the MCs of Aggie Pack during that game. Lots of excitement about moving to D1, lots of excitement with the new stadium, and a lot of work from two staff with a dedicated team of 12-15 sports marketing + promotions interns.

We dragged around 5-10 ancient IMac computers from the G-street annex to the stadium. We would staff the ticket office before the week before the game and on game day. Students swiped cards on a reader connected to these computers and we had a database that tracked each students attendance. First swipe was an Aggie Blue shirt. Then any other swipe was recorded, 3rd game was a beanie, 5th game sweat shirt etc. Targeted email blasts, Facebook groups, chalking, flyers, signs on stakes, we did it all for the bigger games.

This was almost 20 years ago. With the advent smart phones and abundance of tech savvy students it wouldn't take much to at least recreate some similar tracking.

I don’t really understand how they gave up on things that had been working. The tracking may have been rudimentary then, but think of the targeted marketing that would be possible today.

Hard to believe, but yes the student culture has shifted so far now that these students do not value football or the gameday experience...like at all. That picture was only 17 years ago...I graduated 4 years before that - and everybody in my class were rabid on gameday, it was a complete and total party, and a social thing for much of the campus. We all went back to study on Sunday, but Saturday afternoon and evening were slotted for supporting the team in the Fall.

That's the thing, once it becomes a cool thing to do, it gains a life of its own. I'm still baffled that students may have been ignorant of 500 free tickets for a home NCAA playoff game, and the dept seems to promote staff for external awards. The last times I was at The Toom, the North End Zone was bananas.