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Message: [QUOTE="TheFarmFan, post: 4763510, member: 9403"] Yeah, I'll just speak for Stanford now (although I'm also a Cal alum, I never got bit by the Cal sports bug, and I know even less about U$C and FUCLA): I actually think they market the WBB team pretty well, and a lot of games have a ton of families with young kids, as well as retirees (the two major demographics who come to WBB games). But I'd welcome your thoughts about how exactly the Stanford AD should be marketing given the following local community demographics: The median sales price of a home in Palo Alto is [URL='https://www.redfin.com/city/14325/CA/Palo-Alto/housing-market']$3m[/URL]. No, that's not a typo. (And in nearby Menlo Park and Mountain View, it's a mere [URL='https://www.redfin.com/city/11961/CA/Menlo-Park/housing-market']$2.3m[/URL] and [URL='https://www.redfin.com/city/12739/CA/Mountain-View/housing-market']$1.8m[/URL]...) By comparison, it's [URL='https://www.redfin.com/city/4149/SC/Columbia/housing-market']$243k in Columbia, SC[/URL], [URL='https://www.redfin.com/city/477/IA/Ames/housing-market']$280k in Ames, IA[/URL], [URL='https://www.redfin.com/city/9788/IA/Iowa-City/housing-market']$282k in Iowa City, IA[/URL], and [URL='https://www.redfin.com/city/26146/CT/Storrs/housing-market']$357k in Storrs, CT[/URL]. The types of people who can afford $3m houses also travel (either for work or pleasure) most weekends, probably have a second home in Tahoe or Hawaii, and have kids who are themselves on weekend travel teams and/or fully spoken for with other activities. (And they also tend to be people whose jobs are well north of 40 hours per week...) There simply isn't time to be a season ticket holder and go to most games. Nor can you count on Stanford students: we have just under 7,000 undergrads, and 1 in 7 is a varsity athlete. While they're great about coming to each other's games, most varsity athletes have their own games most weekends. And the rest of the student body is also spread thin with so many options in any given weekend: you might want to catch our four-times reigning national champ men's gymnastics team, our twice reigning women's water polo team, or our extremely competitive WVB team. (And a ton of non-varsity students participate in club sports that are themselves highly competitive and involve a lot of away travel.) Also remember that we coined the "Nerd Nation" moniker for a reason: a ton of our students are big nerds who couldn't give two flips about any sport, let alone WBB! I honestly just think Stanford was optimized for the prior era of college sports that monetized not on the basis of numerical eyeballs but on the basis of the depth of booster support. Given everything I've just said, it's probably not surprising that we have a ton of rich alumni, and over the past 40 years, Stanford tapped those resources to ensure all our teams were extremely well funded and could out compete based on resources and educational opportunities. But now between NIL deals based on followers and fans, and revenue increasingly linked to TV contracts that are themselves linked to fans/viewers, Stanford is not as well positioned for this new era. And it's become so damn academically competitive, the student body that is admitted is even less likely to be tailgating on the weekends. Take a peek over at our Cardboard fan board and you'll see [URL='https://thecardboard.org/board/showthread.php?tid=24317&pid=394823#pid394823']thread after thread[/URL] of angsting about whether the new landscape is an existential threat to our ability to remain a top sports school. TL;DR: Sure, marketing could always be better, and would marginally improve things. But I tend to think the deck is somewhat stacked against us over the longer term. [/QUOTE]

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