As NCAA athletic directors look to improve the fan experience, UF’s Ben Hill Griffin Stadium could be in for a facelift that will reduce seating capacity. Let us explain.

by Pat Dooley (BSJ ’76)

There have been a lot of doom-and-gloom oracles gnashing their teeth about the future of college football — NIL, the portal, super conferences, legal gambling, cats and dogs living together.

In my day, sonny, we didn’t need flibberty-flapperty helmets and we kept score on an abacus, not some new-fangled scoreboard with rap music blaring out of speakers.

OK, settle down, grandpa, and listen to the latest news.

The first full season of NIL (Name, Image and Likeness), the thing that’s going to kill college football? Average attendance at football games had its biggest increase in more than four decades.

While we wait for you to finish your cartoon headshake, you know the reasons. Football was on a decline in terms of putting butts in seats for eight years. That doesn’t include the COVID year of 2020. With Americans feeling safer and desperate to return to stadiums it’s no surprise fans wanted to share high fives.

It’s also easier to use mobile devices to send people tickets you aren’t going to use instead of leaving them in the dresser drawer. Tickets are at a premium like never before, but Dennis Dodd of CBS Sports points out that college fans tend to be more affluent than their peers and “rising prices have not deterred them.”

You’d think NCAA athletic directors would be having a clambake/dance-off at the latest news … but, remember, this is a one-year trend fueled by a gaggle of new coaching hires that brought enthusiasm to places such as Southern Cal, LSU and TCU. Not surprisingly, the South led the way with six of the Top 10 average attendances coming from the SEC and a seventh from a school (Texas) that will be in the conference next year.

Fans are back. The mission is to keep them back. It’s not going to be enough to serve over-priced beer and soggy nachos.

The Gators haven’t averaged a crowd of more than 90,000 since Dan Mullen’s first season in 2015 and Urban Meyer’s final season (2010). Back then, people were willing to sit cheek-to-cheek with the sun boring a hole in their spines to experience a game in the Swamp.

The university wants that again. Some of that is on Billy Napier to give fans a reason to get off the couch. But even going 6-7 last season, Florida averaged 87,180 fans, in part because of an excellent home schedule. Scott Stricklin and other athletic directors across the country have been working on that for years as attendance dwindled.

If you build up your schedule, they will come.

“You want to make it where people who are trying to decide, you don’t make it negotiable,” Stricklin said. “Don’t give them a reason not to go. Make it fan friendly and safer and figure out a way to enhance the environment. There’s something called FOMO, ‘Fear of Missing Out.’ You want fans not wanting to miss out, and in the South there’s no bigger event than college football.”

Which goes back to scheduling. The SEC will take care of most of it with a nine-game conference schedule starting in 2024. Schools such as Florida had already strengthened their schedules with better non-conference games (although some will have to be moved around with the SEC’s expansion).

Here’s a hypothetical schedule for the Gators in 2025:

• USF
• at Tennessee
• at Miami
• Oklahoma
• Auburn
• Alabama
• South Carolina
• Georgia (in Jacksonville)
• at Mississippi State
• at LSU
• Kentucky
• at FSU

Brutal. And it could be worse.

On the other hand, home games against Oklahoma for the first time ever, and Auburn, Alabama, South Carolina and Kentucky are going to boost ticket sales.

“The new schedule is going to drive it,” Stricklin said. “So is the expanded College Football Playoff.”

The CFP goes from four to 12 teams next year. Almost as importantly, more schools will be in the mix, again increasing attendance.

It’s not going to be status quo in America’s stadiums, either. The sale of alcohol is a concession for administrators who were fighting against the easy-access mini-fridges in the sports rooms of America. The next move is to make everything a little more comfortable for fans willing to make the effort of finding parking, fighting lines and braving weather.

UF is looking to refurbish the Swamp, and the project will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. That will mean actually cutting back a bit on seating. There’s no way to add to the structure of the stadium, so to put in wider aisles and bigger seats, crowd capacity has to be reduced.

If the university builds club seating on the eastside, for instance, there’ll be fewer chairs in the rest of the stadium. Florida won’t end up with “boutique stadiums” like at San Diego State and Alabama-Birmingham, where they can sit 35,000 and 47,100, or like one of those modern NFL stadiums that host 65,000 fans, but seats will be lost.

“It’s a challenge,” Stricklin said. “Those NFL stadiums seat 65,000 really comfortably, but they don’t have student sections and a band. I would hope that when we get down to doing something, any decrease would be minimal. Part of what makes the Swamp special is everyone crammed in there. We want to ease it up a little.”

It’s still down the road, but all over the country — even the South — ADs are wrestling with ways to make the experience good enough to leave your TV at home.

Or maybe bring it with you.

They might have hookups.

Sportswriter Pat Dooley (BSJ ’76) covered the Gators for The Gainesville Sun for 33 years until his retirement in 2020. He still shares his love for Gator sports through his podcast, “Another Dooley Noted,” and WRUF radio program, “Dooley’s Back 9.” His Gator Nation News column does not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Florida.