Monday, May 2, 2011
I’m a football fan. And when I came to the University two years ago, I thought I was coming to a newly constructed football school. A school that would have a bowl trip every year of my college career. Obviously, I was mistaken. Kansas is a basketball school and don’t get me wrong, I still get chills walking into Allen Fieldhouse and my heart still crushes with every loss, but football is my true passion.
So when I got up last Saturday at 9 a.m. to go help cover the Spring Game for a station I intern at, I was excited to say the least. I’d get to watch some football, shoot some highlights and work on my tan—the perfect Saturday.
When I got there, I thought the crowd was pretty decent considering that the team is coming off a hard year, but then I realized that a lot of the people who were there were alumni and their families.
When I went home, I looked on some other Big 12 schools’ websites to see what their attendance was. Kansas had about 6,000 people. Our state rivals, Kansas State, had over 2,000 more people than us at 8,594 fans. This all seems like child’s play when you look at Texas’ spring game—45,000 fans. I kept checking to make sure the comma was in the right place.
Kansas’ football team is not going to have an easy season. The low attendance reminds me of last summer when our beloved Jayhawks looked like they might not have a home when the Big 12 was projected to crumble. Kansas has basketball, we all know that. Late Night At The Phog this year, the basketball equivalent to a spring game, was completely packed, but that wasn’t enough to make us as attractive to the other conferences as Nebraska or Texas was.
The reason for this is simple—money. There were two articles published on CNN.com taking information from the department of education on how much profit both football and basketball made. In 2010, they reported that the Kansas basketball team made $7,517,783 dollars in profit. Not bad right? Well, the Texas football team made $68,830,484 in the 2009-2010 school year—almost ten times as much. And Kansas was one of the schools with the bigger profits in basketball.
For Kansas to have that kind of sway that Texas had during the Big 12 negotiations, it would need decades upon decades of college football success. And judging by the empty seats in Memorial Stadium last Saturday, we aren’t quite there. And looking at the schedule, our young team will have a difficult time next year.
But then again, who knows, we are in the year that the Chiefs made the playoffs and the Royals hadn’t ruined their chance of winning their division within the first two weeks.
— Edited by Brittany Nelson
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Comments
Brew: Jayhawk fans need to broaden their horizons
"The reason for this is simple—money."
While I agree that money is the reason, it's more specific than that. Conference realignment is not based on revenue from ticket sales and other such things, but rather TV markets. That is why Texas and Nebraska have so much clout in negotiations with conferences: their TV markets are huge. Kansas? Not so much. Not only do we have two major universities competing for one small state's TV market, the KC Metro area also has Mizzou, the Chiefs, and the Royals to whom to pay attention. Not exactly a guaranteed boon for networks like Texas or Nebraska football.
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