NCAA football final shows culture gap
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Football fans from two of the reddest states will invade one of the bluest areas of the nation Monday.
Clemson and Alabama are playing for the national championship at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, 45 miles southeast of San Francisco. But it might seem like a foreign country for some of their traveling fans.
“I don’t care if we play in North Korea,” an anonymous fan wrote on an internet message board dedicated to Clemson University in South Carolina. “I’m going to the game and I’m thrilled. Yes I may see homeless and Nancy Pelosi (the House speaker from San Francisco). I don’t care.”
The college football cultural gap
seems to have gotten more pronounced as the nation’s political divide’s deepened, and the championship game provides an especially stark example of the distance in between, literally and otherwise.
Although the game is technically a sellout, prices on the secondary ticket market are the lowest since the College Football Playoff format started in 2014
15, according to SeatGeek. And while some fans say nothing could keep them away, others have cited distance and cost as reasons they will not attend.
“I have been made aware that, because of the distance to the two schools, some fans will not be able to make it out to Santa Clara for the game,” College Football Playoff executive director Bill Hancock told USA TODAY. “One of our goals when the CFP was created was to move the championship game around the country, so people in different areas could experience top-level championship college football. And that will come to pass – new fans will be exposed to this great sport.”
Viewership, attendance and on-field results show the sport is still dominated by much more politically red areas.
Only one of the top 30 teams in average attendance this season came from west of Kansas – Washington, which ranked 19th. The top 29 most intense television markets for viewing regularseason games on ESPN and ABC came from two fanatic regions:
❚ The South, which includes Texas, Oklahoma and Florida under the U.S. Census Bureau definition. Birmingham, Alabama, ranked first again with 6.7 percent of its TV households watching on average, according to Nielsen data.
❚ The Midwest, plus nearby Pittsburgh, dotted the top 25, led by several markets in Ohio.
Seattle was the top Western market for ESPN, ranking 30th with an average of 1.9 percent, according to ESPN’s rankings of the 56 biggest markets.
This reflects the success of their schools. Teams from the South also have won 12 of the past 13 national championships, with Ohio State winning the other. Other cultural factors play a role, too.
“The fervor for football and how it sorts out is part of a larger cultural set of beliefs that are reflected in political attitudes, in religious viewpoints and just the way in which people grow up and view their particular part of the world,” said Ellen Staurowksy, a professor of sport management at Drexel University. “It’s a 21st-century form of entertainment but something that has deep roots in rural America.”
Historically rural and agricultural parts of the Midwest and South have tilted conservative politically and have helped build fan bases over generations where no pro teams competed for their attention. Nebraska, Alabama, Clemson and Oklahoma are among the few teams last year that drew more than 50,000 for spring intrasquad scrimmages. By con- trast, just months after an epic Rose Bowl victory in 2017, former national powerhouse Southern California had about 14,000 attend its spring scrimmage in Los Angeles.
“One element that gets overlooked in the red states vs. blue states football question is attitudes on parenting,” said Murray Sperber, a professor who has taught at Indiana and California and has written books on college sports. “There have been studies on this, and some show that Trump voters value obedience very highly, often highest, in their children. Whereas Hillary ( voters often wanted their children to become independent, creative, etc. Apply this to football parents and fans, throw in the military tradition in football and the controversy over concussions, and you get some explanation why football thrives in red states and declines in blue ones.”
The continental divide also stretches to Colorado, where new head coach Mel Tucker arrived in the West-based Pac-12 Conference last month after serving as defensive coordinator at Georgia. Instead of unanimously approving his contract, as usually happens with a new coach, part of Colorado’s governing board protested. Two of the eight voting regents voted against it, citing concerns for player safety in football and the high costs of college athletics.
Tucker quickly learned he wasn’t in the Southeastern Conference anymore, where five of its public school head coaches last year made more in guaranteed pay than the top public school coach in the Pac-12: Washington’s Chris Petersen at $4.4 million. Coaching pay reflects customer demand, which is regionally lopsided.
“By any metric, the Pac-12 is at a disadvantage compared to the SEC and Big Ten because the demand for college football on the West Coast in general, and particularly in its major markets, is not as high,” said Jeff Nelson, president of Navigate, a research firm in Chicago that advises brands and organizations in sports and entertainment. “There are more casual fans and not enough avid fans.”
In the Northeast, the six New England states don’t even have a team in the Power Five conferences except Boston College.
The Midwest-based Big Ten Conference tried to tap into New York, the biggest media market, when it added Rutgers in New Jersey as a member in
2014. But the Scarlet Knights have had four consecutive losing seasons since
2015. And New York isn’t exactly a college football town.
This leaves the South and Midwest as the sport’s supreme money hub. The SEC television network has about
59 million subscribers and is getting an average of about 78 cents per subscriber in fees, according to Kagan, S&P Global Market Intelligence. Kagan estimates the Pac-12 Network has about 19 million subscribers and is commanding an average fee of about 11 cents.
The Big Ten Network has 51 million subscribers and is getting 56 cents per subscriber on average, according to Kagan. Combined with other media revenue, this helps the SEC and Big Ten lead the Power Five conferences in revenue-sharing with payouts to member schools that exceed $40 million and $50 million each. The Pac-12 might not hit $38 million per school until 2023, according to projections.
However, Monday’s game will be played deep in the heart of the Pac-12, where 73 percent of voters in Santa Clara County chose Hilary Clinton in her bid for president in 2016, making it an unlikely party scene for the redstate visitors.
Next year the final is in New Orleans.
The West is “never going to be on equal playing ground” with the South, said Jackie Sherrill, the former head coach at Texas A&M, Mississippi State, Washington State and Pitt. “That comes back to culture,” said Sherrill, who played at Alabama in the
1960s.