Well it is kind of difficult. Outside of 10 or 15 schools it's extremely difficult to win long term.
Pitt Attendance/Atmosphere continues to hurt recruiting 4/5 star recruits
- Thread starter Panther Al
- Start date
Well it is kind of difficult. Outside of 10 or 15 schools it's extremely difficult to win long term.
The Duke game after Clemson is often cited as an indictment of poor fan support. But it's more an indictment of the cruelty of the college football system to maintain interest, especially in a pro town. If the Steelers were having a mediocre season and looked unlikely to make the playoffs, but (say) pulled off an unlikely road win over New England to put them back in the wildcard or division hunt, and then had a home game... I'd imagine there would big sudden interest and walk up action. Because suddenly the playoffs were at stake, and even a wildcard berth gives you a shot (however tough) to win it all.
However, for Pitt, by the time of the Clemson win, the damage had been done. We weren't gonna win the Coastal, and thus we had no chance to win the conference (or certainly not to go to the college football playoff). At best we were gonna get a marginal bowl no matter what, and it really didn't matter if we had 6, 7, or 8 wins, we'd be slotted into one of the least appealing of those bowls.
It's our own fault for losing a couple of close games we had every chance to win, so I'm not whining. But in a pro town especially, having no chance for a championship at all squashes fan interest in coming out for late season games.
The Pirates have a much larger pool to draw from. When they do a $1 night or fireworks night, there target audience is basically all 2 million Western Pennsylvanians because almost everyone is a Pirate fan or a "annual night out at PNC fan" to some degree. Pitt has very few fans in comparison and a $1 Pitt night against Albany isn't going to sell more than maybe a couple thousand extra tickets, maybe, and you pi$$ off season ticket holders for that extra 2000 sold seats.
I've said this before, if Pitt announced all upper deck seats were free for the entire year, it would not make a noticeable difference in crowd size. Price is not keepikg keeping Pitt fans away. Pitt draws a good amount of fans for what it is, a relatively small school with small alumni base (compared with other P5s) playing in a city where it is the minor league team. The problem is not the fans, the price, or the location. Its the size of Heinz Field. If 30K seats were destroyed from HF tomorrow, the 40K at a Pitt game vs Albany would be absolutely rocking.
No discussion the CENSOR threatened already..
PM trial has what to do with Muellers Russian HOAX Trump witch hunt?
Boris wants to know....
Where are Moose and Squirrel?
Since we'll be past Penn State on the schedule after this year, I think the AD is going to institute some type of change, whether it involves outright tarps, or just restricting season tic sales to the lower bowl.
I personally think the harping on attendance is a vehicle of the local media that is mostly made up of grads from traditional Pitt rivals. But I get the impression from interviews in recent years that Pitt leadership is growing sensitive to the negative optics of the attendance. Lyke and Gallagher seem more proactive on perceived problem areas, as the Stallings firing showed.
We aren't gonna get the Steelers to agree to dark seats, so that pretty much limits any other options.
It also only sold out less than 24 hours before kickoff and 7000 or so Cincy fans helped out.
Exactly. It is not a pricepoint thing at all. It is more of a habit thing. People here just aren't in the habit of going to a college football game. They grew up, most who went to another college or did not go, rooting for the pro teams in town. Hell, let's face it, the local kids who went or go to Pitt likely grew up rooting for the Steelers before they did Pitt.
In our lifetimes, well most of ours, the Steelers sustained period of "down time", they still went to the AFC Championship game in 1985 and was a dropped past away from knocking off the Broncos in 1989. Contrast this with say the Browns or Lions or Titans......and at the same time, Pitt could have put a real foothold on a fanbase here, and well....we floundered despite having top 10 recruiting classes.
In my cognizant sports viewing life.....meaning from like 8 years old and over, that is now 40+ years (ahem), the Steelers have drafted in the Top 10, what twice?? That means they were bottom 10 only 2 times in like 45 years. That kind of sustained success is hard to compete against when your high water marks are like an 8-5 type of season.
They are going to have to. Every AD has said the goal is to sell every seat. That sounds nice but it isn't realistic. Pitt cannot fill 70K fans for Syracuse or GT. Pitt literally would have to become an Alabama or Ohio State and be and annual Top 5 team, not one year but every year to sell out games like that. An 8-4 or even a consistent 9-3 type program isnt going to sell 70K for those games.
The goal of the AD should be how to improve the atmosphere for what a realistic reasonable Pitt crowd will be.
"OK, we are going to draw somewhere between 35K and 50K unless we are a CFP contending program or PSU, ND, WVU, or a blue blood comes in, how can we improve the gameday atmosphere for that 35K-50K."
I've said it a million times, you have to eliminate the upper deck endzone and the upper deck non-TV sideline. That gives you a 45K seat stadium roughly with people sitting closer together. Whether you tarp over the seats or leave them empty yellow is a secondary discussion
Agreed. The early to mid 80s were our best chance to rise to a blue blood status. We were still getting great recruiting (think of our fleet of elite tailbacks at one time in the mid 80s!). The Steelers had a bit of a lull. The Pirates and Pens were dead. A couple of NC runs would have helped us approach critical mass in the region as the Steelers had done in the late 70s. WPA was hurting then and would have thrown behind a big sports winner more than ever.
But we squandered it ... first allowing Sherrill to leave, then choosing poorly in his replacement, underachieving on the field with top notch talent, and failing to upgrade facilities (quite the opposite, actually). By the early 90s, the O Conner fiasco led to "public ivy" pretensions, the misguided faith in Hackett, the desperation that was Majors 2, and the bottom totally dropping out. By then, blue blood status and pecking order in college football was so firmly entrenched thanks to ESPN and the conference structure that we've never really recovered. I had hope that the ACC would propel us but not so far.
In the current structure I don't foresee a giant leap either. Too many top recruits are content to be stockpiled by the blue bloods. The networks as now configured aren't likely to allow that to change.
Best hope for Pitt, keeping Narduzzi and a stable staff around similar to Beamer at VT and hope he can slowly build a better program with solid depth. And like Washington, catch lightning in a bottle some year. That and if cable tv dissolves into an ad-hoc model and college football is forced to reconfigure to allow more even competition. Big if's.
Pitt has yet to recover from The Killer Bees arrogance toward Jackie,and the same in the aftermath by simply handing the job to Foge.
I contend that the move to match A&M and give Sherrill what he wants, or at least then hiring Jimmy Johnson instead of Foge goes down as one of the single worst blunders in college football history. IN ITS HISTORY! No program has ever had such a self inflicted blow, and in conjunction with SMU's "Death Penalty", no punishment worse.
Apparently those of you with the “winning cures all” mantra never bothered watching the YouTube video of Pitt vs Syracuse 1979. 3 years removed from a NC, Dan Marino at QB, Hugh Green at DE and 15 k empty seats to watch over things.
It's a good thing we got this settled. We'll never have to have this conversation again, will we?
Maybe Pitt just got lucky in the 70s with Majors and his tons of recruits. They University was clearly unable to support the success long term. Pitt won the lottery and then didn't know how to manage their winnings, then went bankrupt. As opposed to acquiring wealth over time via smart decisions.
Yes, because it has never been discussed, nor has anyone ever suggested reasons and solutions.
Pretty much. One area I always contend is a hidden consequence: if we make the right decisions, continued winning significantly, maintain facilities, also upgrading our basketball similarly... we'd have had a fighting chance to have been invited into the Big Ten over (or with) PSU at the time of the original expansion. It seems far fetched in retrospect because of how things really happened for us. But if we had made all the right moves leading up to that, I think things would have been drastically different.
Absolutely true. Pitt has been its own worst enemy, and the Sherrill exit/Foge hire is Exhibit A, Your Honor. Pitt was RIGHT THERE but threw it away in the worst eggheads-in-the-Cathedral debacle since the departure of Jock Sutherland.
Well, if youre going to play that nitpicking game, the weather was fairly crappy so that kept a few casual Pitt fans from buying tix and ... EVERY college team in America has opposing fans in attendance (especially big games). Do you think it's ALL Ohio St fans at an OSU/Michigan game in Columbus? And if you were at that game in '09, you barely noticed Cincy fans... Because there were 63000 fans and they were outnumbered 9-1. And at one point 1 in every 9 Pitt fan was being body pressed above their fellow Pitt fans heads. Winning brings fans in Pittsburgh. Do it on the regular and you build atmosphere.
Yes, the weather was cold but my point was that ONLY 58K Pitt fans showed for a championship game against an undefeated #4 team for a berth in the Sugar Bowl. And not every team travels. Let me ask you this, lets say on that day, all Pitt had to do was beat 4-7 Syracuse to win the BE. Syracuse would have traveled 100 fans. How many Pitt fans would have showed? My guess is 49K. Pitt just doesn't have a large enough fanbase to fill Heinz except for the most unique circumstances
I think this is a fair answer.
About the only defense I can offer to not having full houses then was the fact that we were in the midst of both Steeler mania at its peak and the Pirates also competing strongly. The region in tough economic straits. And it was pre-ESPN when college sports was more of niche entertainment than the mainstream/ primetime pastime they'd would become in the 80s and 90s. Combined, there was less capacity for the region to give Pitt football top priority then. Doesn't mean it alleviates the dismay of fan indifference then (though really, crowds weren't terrible, just not SRO) ... nor excuses the school for poor husbandry of the success. Just observations.
This isn't true. There are absolutely staffs with much, much better recruiters than we have. There are lots of staffs who can point to much better NFL production that our STAFF has. It doesn't matter that Pitt has had a few NFL standouts. It matters what this staff has done. Most haven't done much.
Actually, Pitt's attendance was 30% higher than the national average of Division 1 programs from 76-81.Winning isn't the lone solution, but it does increase attendance.
yeah but check it out in 1981 against cuse on a beautiful saturday at Pitt Stadium. Excellent crowd.
What does national averages have to do anything?
You like to make this false conclusion-
But national average attendance has nothing to do with a lack of filling a right sized on campus stadium, consistently- at the peak of our most successful run.
It’s not the stadium , or the font on the helmet, or the hue of the uniforms,
Simply put, there is not much- and never has been and likely will never be- community interest in Pitt football.
Too much local competition regionally,
It’s okay to simply accept that reality.
I'm showing that statements like 'Pitt never had good attendance even during the great years' is not true, because Pitt had good attendance in comparison to other programs at the time. The University dropped the ball, and we are still suffering.
If Pitt built a top program , there would be many more fans at the games. Sports is so much bigger now then just 20 years ago. Pirates were good back in the 80s and 90s, tons of empty seats. Now if we had those same teams right now , there would be packed crowds each night.
Pitt with a top program right now , on campus, would be magical, times are different and we , Pitt couldn't see the future and dug it's own grave
Pitt with a top program right now , on campus, would be magical, times are different and we , Pitt couldn't see the future and dug it's own grave
I think college has even got bigger and more passion. We just never seen a program worth a shiit since the growth of college football , we are left out, by choice
VT as an example. They use to play in a beat up stadium , like high school quality , this was in the 80s. They choose to build a program , they were drawing 15 000 at their games, now today ...... We are letting Pitt off the hook with this argument. PITT choose to shelve football , keep a team to say they had one , but didn't give two cents about it , all lip service and window dressing
VT has a large, passionate fanbase whose alums and people in their community value VT Football and support them financially. Their support helped build the program. They are PS on a smaller scale.
The Cincy game, as you implied, was a defacto playoff game. Sure, we'll have a good atmosphere if we have a home game where the conference championship is literally on the line. I don't see how that will happen in the ACC, which has a neutral site conference title game. At best we would get a defacto divisional championship game against an opponent, which requires us both to win more games, and to be lucky enough to get that game at home at the end of the season, possibly against the other top divisional foe.
We can't count on that Cincinnati situation very often is my point. Scheduling WVU and PSU is one of the few things we can do to bring in more attendance.
Let's face it, Pitt was "the U" before the U was. And if Sherrill stayed, likely Pitt wins the NC Marino's SR year, likely we contend and maybe win another over the next few years, and we again become what Miami became. Of course, the NCAA may have come harder after us, I think when they really started looking at Pitt as a program with recruiting violations, they saw the incompetency running Pitt sports and football and figure those sanctions where worse than what they could have done.
What are you talking about? Va Tech has played in Lane Stadium since the '60's, and by 1980 it had a seating capacity of 52,500. It was never a "like high school quality" stadium.
Yes you dolt, it was a glorified high school stadium , my dad played there. It was a SHIIT HOLE
Beaver Stadium is a glorified high school stadium as well. So are many other top college football venues. So what?
