Remember Pat Fitzgerald?

He’s Northwestern’s football coach, the guy who went on a mini-rant last year calling the run/pass option the “purest form of communism.” The term “communism” didn’t make a ton of sense in regard to the topic, but what he was basically saying is that the RPO is a pain in the ass because it blurs the line between legal and illegal downfield blocking.

Fitzgerald had another good rant at Big 10 media day, this time going on a sidebar that didn’t exactly answer the question but sort of worked as a catch-all complaint about society at large.

See for yourself:

Okay, so first things first, the main reason for declining attendance at all sporting events is because tickets are ~$75, parking is $40, beers are $12, etc. It’s too damn expensive. Plus, you can watch the game at home on your 60 inch high definition TV, then get up and walk to the fridge during one of 300 commercial breaks that a live college football crowd has to sit through on metal bleachers. They wait there patiently, watching nothing in particular, while a dude stands on the field waiting for cues from a television producer, letting him know when he can signal referees that the break is over.


So Fitzgerald is a little off-base in terms of the actual query, in my opinion, but he’s 100% correct on the other stuff. It’s very true that people (not just millennials, but everybody in general) can’t pay attention to something for five seconds because they’re buried in their phone.

This is where I think he nails it:

“You watch a concert and everybody is holding their phone up. (It’s) like, listen! Watch! Take it in. Create a memory, because they don’t go back and watch the videos. They just want to post it on their social media, which is pathetic because it creates a society of ‘look at me, isn’t my life great,’ even when they go home and say ‘I hate myself, I hate my life, everything’s wrong.’ So, I think it’s a big cause. I think it’s the root cause.

It’s the worst at concerts. The absolute worst.

I don’t know how many gigs I’ve been to in the last 5-7 years where people literally just stand there holding their phones up, filming half of the show. They don’t know the songs, they don’t know the lyrics, they don’t absorb the music; they just sit there staring at the band the entire time. It really just sucks the fun out of the show, because there’s no real interaction between band and audience. Ask any musician and they’ll tell you that they thrive off the energy of a crowd, and vice versa. It’s a symbiotic thing, you know? It’s like, ‘you give us energy, we’ll return the energy,’ and then it keeps going around and around again, a cyclical euphoria of sorts.

Perfect example right here; look at how involved this crowd is. No phones, no cameras, nothing like that, just people staying focused on the band and getting into the music:

Great crowd, yeah? That was 1995.

Now look at this picture I shot in 2016 at a Union Transfer gig in Philly:

It’s awful. It’s really bad.

So I get what Fitzgerald is saying, and he’s right that cell phones are a distraction. We don’t communicate with each other in public the way we used to. A lot of people are glued to screens in general and sometimes basic human interaction in 2019 is much harder than it needs to be.

But I’m not sure that’s what’s causing attendance issues at sporting events. Tailgating and tickets are expensive. It’s time consuming and usually takes up most of your weekend packing the car, driving up to Happy Valley, unpacking, sitting there for four hours, etc. Then you’re drunk anyway by the time the game starts.

There are more options, more entertainment choices these days and more places to spend your money, so people who market live sports need to think about what other people are choosing to do with their time/money and go from there.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll give Coggin the final word:

Time’s yours.