Can TV save Ivy League football?

Ivy football attendance has dropped one-third since its peak in the 1980s. Is television the cause of the Ivy League's steep decline in football attendance in recent years -- off as much as a third from its pinnacle in the 1980s -- as well as the cure for such decline? That question has become a main topic of conversation among Ivy League officials as they try to reverse the trend of declining football attendance that began in 1984, the year the Supreme Court ended the NCAA's monopoly on televised college football and opened the floodgates to the glut of games now clogging the airwaves. While other hypotheses have been offered to explain the attendance drop -- everything from the boom in youth sports (which presumably keeps alumni parents too busy to attend weekend football games) to increased student apathy -- the negative impact of the Supreme Court ruling is paramount in the minds of most league officials. As David Roach, Brown's athletic director, asked rhetorically, "If Penn is playing a school in the Ivy League on October 5 and you live in Philadelphia, are you going to the Penn game or are you going to stay home and watch Notre Dame-Michigan?" The numbers appear to justify this view. Until 1984, Ivy League football attendance was on the rise, increasing more than 25 percent from the beginning of that decade to an average of more than 15,000 fans per game in 1984. But after that pivotal year, attendance began a steady decline, bottoming out at roughly 10,000 per game -- the level the league has been at for the last five years despite the presence of such future NFL players as Jay Fielder (Dartmouth), Keith Elias (Princeton) and Miles Macik (Penn). "One of the reasons for the decline," Chuck Yrigoyen, associate director of the Ivy League, said bluntly, "was that [Ivy football] was perceived to be an inferior product, especially when TV is flooded with college football games." The league's reputation was tarnished, Yrigoyen added, when the Ivy League moved from Division I to Division I-AA in 1982 -- just two years before the fateful Supreme Court decision. The decline has been a source of concern among Ivy athletic directors. "First and foremost, you want to have many people in the stands so the players feel some support," said Richard Jaeger, Dartmouth's athletic director. "Secondly, it's a matter of revenue -- ticket sales earn money that goes to support the team. I don't think that in the Ivy League there's a single football team that makes enough from the sale of football tickets to support the running of the football team." Ivy League schools have attempted to boost attendance in different ways. Yale adopted a free student admission policy three years ago and has conducted numerous community outreach programs. This season, Penn scheduled a night game (to entice students who feel that 1:30 p.m. is early morning), complete with a laser light show. And Brown recently hired a marketing firm to promote all of its athletic programs. But some feel that the best solution is for the league to fight the flood of televised college football games by joining the fray. "The Ivy League needs to do a better job in promoting and marketing the league," Roach said. "One of the things we need to have is a T.V. package. By having a T.V. package and game of the week, what it does for the public is to give us more credibility." While a television package would likely necessitate corporate sponsorship, Ivy presidents have already indicated to league officials that they believe corporate sponsorship can be accomplished without undue commercialization. In fact, the major concern about a television package has not been commercialization, but rather that it may decrease game attendance even further. "There's always the question that, if the game is at your place, will people who could go to the game just stay at home?" said Jeff Orleans, executive director of the Ivy League. But the feeling among league officials, Orleans added, is that this potential negative is outweighed by the benefits of the increased exposure a television package provides, especially in building the Ivy League's fan base. Orleans is hopeful that a suitable package will be approved by the Ivy presidents in June and will be in place by 1998. However, other league officials feel that a television package will be successful -- and attendance will increase -- only if the caliber of play is improved. "Before you talk about cable deals," Penn Athletic Director Steve Bilsky said, "you have to look at the product." What is needed, Bilsky added, is a "commitment from the very top, which in this case means the presidents, [to make] Ivy football better than it is today, because right now there is no television package." However, Bilsky voiced skepticism about the league's commitment to improving the level of play. "I think sometimes things are encouraging," Bilsky said. "But then I go to every game, and I look in the stands and see very sparse crowds, and I don't see anyone jumping up and down and saying this is not right. "I think we're in flux. I think the next five years or so will probably determine whether the Ivies continue to drift in football or take some tangible action to improve itself."

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