This is not entirely unrelated to football. The programs that are having success at the gate and with Gameday revenues are those that have figured out how to broaden participation in a premium experience beyond suites. Look at what Cal and UW have done converting stadium areas to bigger club areas with TVs, different food options and pricey drinks. UCU has the bootleg version of this under the basket. Irvine and SLO have pregame hoops club events where they feed the donors, fill them up with drinks and the staff comes in and breaks down the other team ahead of the game. This sort of offering appeals to a different segment of the market. At Davis, UCUC shows that simply having more seats does not translate to attendance. Same with football. Even the games with attendance listed over capacity had plenty of open seating. The addition of suites is only beneficial to the extent that Mrak wants to push some of the university partnerships more heavily into athletics. But suites are expensive and don’t generate a ton of cash if you only have 5 to sell (subtracting UC Health, Credit Union, Chancellor). A much greater ROI opportunity is a wine garden one side and a bbq/brew seating section in one of the end zones. Add TVs to appeal to non UCD die hards and the average spend will increase 4x. SLO and Montana State opened up these sections over the past couple seasons and are doing well with them.

Just need to let those guys do what they do. What’s your take on hoops as a recent grad? Student participation is well behind UCI, SB, SD, and this is a situation where Davis has the largest venue of the bunch, the most students within walking distance, and pretty solid play.

It’s free tickets and toomey level attendance accuracy. There are less than 2,500 seats in that thing.

It’s going to get less expensive. This is one of the few things that Davis is playing correctly. The Sacramento corporate dollar, which is not large, ain’t going to Sac State athletics. They are redirecting some of the minimal support they have to sponsor a suicide mission to Tuesday night football on espnu in the MAC.

Now I’ve heard it all. Academic alignment with unlv, Wyoming, New Mexico and utep.

Actually, no, there are 12-15 programs in similar situations and everyone has decided that jumping right now makes little sense. NDSU and Sac had different reasons to move.

Unrelated. This one is a walk on from San Diego coming off an ACL early in his senior season.

That could be the case. Oregon game was during the band-uh era. There was a good crowd at Nevada the year prior. Always drew well at SLO when the band would travel since you get 150 kids plus all of the parents and friends.

Again, who are these people? They didn’t show in Seattle last season. Didn’t show up at Cal in 24. Really limited support at Corvallis and Fresno pre-Plough. Even in 18 the Ags beat SJSU week 1 with no support (for either team) and played at a ranked Stanford team two weeks later in front of a friends and family crowd.

The subscription model is based on participating in football. Even football streaming of the MWC network, which was free, was not a significant number. And that was with Boise, Fresno and SDSU in the league.

The quarterback play was…not good. That game was Plough’s quest to put coaching over talent and he lost the battle. None of these freshmen are plug and play.

Correct. The budget is 50m. 2/3 of revenues are derived from student fees. 2/3 of expenses are scholarship costs. Admin has been cut substantially which is why there is not much marketing going on. Equestrian was a big blunder.

I don’t recall if you were back for the UNC game. If not, that would be an enlightening watch for you.

Agree. There will be a fulsome realignment when the TV schools break from the pack and the next tier down will have its own playoff. There will not be a buy in to get to that level. In fact, there will be begging to get programs to spend at the current G5 level. And the Cal fans here should go do Cal and enjoy that 5-7 with 50% roster turnover every year. Good luck finding Wagner without wiki and most of the ACC without a map.

Yes let’s use the single biggest outlier in the history of a 150 year old sport as our guiding light…

You just described the 2026 Mountain West Conference.

+ Cisco

Tell us more about these people. The folks that think Davis is playing in DII. These savants are juiced for SJSU, New Mexico and the Nevada schools? Seems far fetched.

This is what people said about basketball with the move up to play peer institutions. Notice the crowd for Santa Barbara on Thursday. If anything, support is worse than 30 years ago for basketball.

Portal was a net negative for Poly but Skipper could be a really good fit for the long term. They lost OL these last two cycles to Michigan and Bama and it’s not like Wulff had those guys knocking teams off the LOS consistently.

You’re missing a lot of things. He has an agent, his signing was announced by WSU, etc.