College football has an in-stadium attendance problem nowadays. That’s an inarguable fact, and one that virtually every program in America is dealing with right now.
We all see the empty tracts in Tiger Stadium. Most of them don’t change for most of the season, save for maybe the biggest games, and even then we rarely see the standing-room-only sellouts we were used to even a few years ago.
So why is it happening? Is it smartphones? Nah. College football has been a sport built on the in-game experience for some 100 years. In the last 50 or so, television has slowly eaten into that — and that market share has officially reached critical mass.