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by _delirium 4537 days ago
The general lack of interest in minor-league baseball also shows one reason why other sports aren't keen to move to that model (though the long history each sport has built up makes that kind of change pretty hard to do anyway).

From a marketing perspective, college sports are a minor league that comes with a built-in fanbase, the students & alumni at the universities (especially large universities). The top end of college sports teams are essentially the NFL's and NBA's minor league outfits, but compare how many fans and attention a Texas, Michigan, USC, Stanford, etc. game gets (in either football or basketball) to what a minor-league baseball team gets...
1 comments
sentenza 4537 days ago
That is interesting. When the local third league football team plays, here in my part of Germany, the stadium is packed. I recently read a news report about how our local government is complaining that the police operation surrounding the game costs 100.000€ per game for that third league team.
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colomon 4537 days ago
When my university's football team plays a home game, there are usually 110,000 people in attendance. The streak of 100,000+ people for each home game goes back to 1975.
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TheCoelacanth 4537 days ago
In terms of attendance, the top college teams beat even professional teams. The 13 largest stadiums in the US are all for college football [1]. You have to go all the way to number 14 before you get to a stadium used for professional sports.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._stadiums_by_capaci...

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_delirium 4537 days ago
Some of that is due to being older stadiums, though. U.S. professional stadiums used to have more capacity, because they were just rows and rows of bleachers. The trend in the past few decades in professional sports has been towards more of the space being used for lower-density "premium" seating like skyboxes and fewer bleachers, reducing the seat count. College sports usually have less funding for new stadiums though, and their market is a bit different (more regular fans paying out of pocket, less demand for corporate skyboxes). Hence you have something like the LA Coliseum, capacity 93,000, used by USC's college football team, but considered an "obsolete" stadium by the NFL and MLB, who used to use it but moved out.
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TheCoelacanth 4537 days ago
That might be the case for some teams, but a lot of NFL teams have trouble consistently selling out the smaller stadiums that they already have.
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