Sports // Mike Finger

More than ever, sports attendance becoming optional

During the final years of his life, Tex Schramm recognized what he had done, and he was proud of it.

It was impossible to imagine the NFL without him. It had been his idea to paint yard-line numbers on the field, so they could be seen on TV. His other innovations included moving the goal posts back, instituting a play clock, giving referees microphones, giving quarterbacks audio headsets in their helmets, and allowing officials to use instant replay.

The longtime Dallas Cowboys executive saw the future of the NFL as clearly as anyone did, and he was not afraid of progress. He pushed for both the scouting combine and the wild card. Those ideas were revolutionary.

But around 2001, during a telephone interview with a young reporter, Schramm said there was one advancement he did not like — the yellow first-down line superimposed onto the field during TV broadcasts.

His reasoning? The league should be careful, he said, about giving people at home something that fans in the grandstands did not have.

The way Schramm saw things, it was a mistake to take attendance for granted.

I have thought about those words often since Schramm’s death at the age of 83 in 2003, and I thought about them again this week.

According to numbers just released by the NCAA, the average attendance at college football games fell for the fourth consecutive year and suffered its worst single-season drop since 1993.

The average attendance went down in four of the five major conferences in 2017 (the Big Ten saw an increase of 0.01 percent). Attendance at bowl games fell for the seventh consecutive year. And overall, 2.7 million fewer fans attended college football games in 2017 than in 2013.

Now, obviously this trend is more nuanced than a yellow first-down line. And the explanation is not quite as simple as saying more people have decided to watch the games at home. It should be noted that college football TV ratings on most networks fell a bit last season, too.

But what Schramm saw coming, even if he did not articulate it as such, was a time when fans have more options, more information, and more ways to get it. If you stay on your couch instead of driving to the stadium, you can flip between three games at a time. If you want to go to the store or to the park or to a restaurant, you can follow the action via stat-trackers or Twitter and not even have to watch it on TV.

Attendance, and even viewership, is now optional.

Of course, with every bit of information we receive about who is watching what, there is no shortage of ways to spin it.

The NFL suffered a 3 percent drop in attendance this season? That obviously was about the racial injustice protests during the national anthem, right? Well, maybe, but that does not explain why attendance fell in college football, which did not feature protests.

Are the sliding football TV ratings the result of cord-cutters who spend more time on the Internet? Perhaps, but why has national NBA viewership soared this season? And if people do not like politics mixed with their sports, why is the league with the most politically outspoken players and coaches seemingly immune to the backlash?

Maybe the NBA will buck the industry-wide trends forever, but it probably will not. Even the Olympics, which used to be surefire ratings gold, are not the same attraction they used to be. According to numbers published by Deadline Hollywood, most of the daily NBC ratings for the PyeongChang Games have been down when compared to those from 2014, and those Sochi Games were the lowest-rated ever for NBC.

So do fewer people care now? That is debatable, and difficult to know for sure.

The truth could be that fewer Americans are interested in these Olympics because there are fewer big-name American stars winning medals. It could be that fewer fans care about the NFL because of protests, or that fewer people are going to college games because students have other things to do.

If Schramm were still alive today, he probably would not have the answers, either. A decade and a half later, we can now definitively say he was wrong to oppose the yellow line.

But as for his warning about not taking attendance for granted? He was on to something there.

Schramm did not predict the iPhone. He did not dare to imagine Snapchat or Facebook Live. But he knew there would be a day when people would reevaluate whether they wanted to sit in the grandstands, and they did not need to be there after all.

Twitter: @mikefinger