[NU Sports] Attendance Woes

[CHerron604 at aol.com]

For reasons that have never been quite clear to me, the NU Football Media Guide publishes a page called (something like) 'Ryan Field Attendance Figures', and then fails to give any figures, mentioning only that fans in Chicago have a lot of choices.

Fortunately the NCAA publishes attendance figures.  Unfortunately, our attendance continues to be pretty weak.

Many have alluded to the 'exciting games' for this year's team, but it hasn't seemed to carry over to the box office.

92   32,989
93   30,965
94   34,382
95   38,230
96   42,310
97   41,868
98   40,907
99   30,845
00   33,498
01   33,763
02   28,611
03   28,771
04   28,408

Some of our peer institutions are way ahead of us - Stanford, 45,000 per game, BC 43,000 per game, Army  36,000 per game, Navy 30,000 per game...Even Baylor is averaging almost 30,000 per game.

We became the first school in the modern era to see their attendance erode by 25% in one year when it plummeted from 40,907 in 98 to 30,845 in 99.

All of this after a pretty major upgrade to facilities.

The team is turning in .500 seasons and generally exciting games - why is attendance so bad ?  Can RW draw crowds in Chicago ?

Chuck Herron   Tech '85