KING JAMES BIBLE: Ivies at Top in D-IAA Crowds

There are exactly 121 schools that play Division I-AA football. Out of those 121, can you name the school that had the highest average attendance this season?

Here’s a hint: many of you traveled to see this team play on a balmy November Saturday.

That’s right. Yale topped the Division I-AA attendance charts this season drawing an average of 23,572 fans per contest.

The Bulldogs finished with the 86th best home attendance in all of college football, ahead of 31 I-A schools, including all eight members of the Sun Belt conference.

A brief aside about the Sun Belt conference. Not since the good old days of the XFL has a league needed to be disbanded this badly. Its eight members combined for five out-of-conference wins last year. Five. And two of those came from North Texas, which currently is heading for the exits faster than a first-year attending his first Ec 10 lecture.

Plus, two of the members—Utah State and Idaho—don’t even make sense. Head up to Moscow, Idaho in November to watch a Sun Belt football and bring me back a highly nuanced definition of the term irony. Because when I think Sun Belt, I think potatoes and snow.

A cynical observer—who actually remembers what I was talking about—might interject that the Harvard-Yale game, which took place in New Haven and drew 53,136 to the vicinity of the stadium, taints the Bulldogs’ attendance coup.

While it is true that the Harvard-Yale cycle does affect the figures for those two schools—Harvard finished eighth in 2002 and Yale finished third in 2001—it can’t explain the following.

Four Ivy schools—Yale, Princeton, Penn and Harvard—finished in the top 25 in attendance and the League as a whole finished third out of all I-AA conferences. The 919 person increase in average turnout League-wide was the second biggest increase of any conference.

But as the top four Ivies have been seeing attendance rise, the bottom four have been fading ever further back.

After No. 25 Harvard, the next highest Ivy squad on the attendance chart is No. 72 Cornell. Columbia and Dartmouth follow three and five spots back, respectively, while Brown sits in 83rd.

Four seasons ago, the Big Red and the Bears ranked in the top third of all I-AA schools in terms of attendance. By 2003, Cornell and Brown saw their turnouts dwindle by 4,146 and 4,400 people per game, respectively.

So, as the top four Ivies in terms of attendance have become extremely competitive on the national stage, the bottom four have seen their crowds slip to levels comparable to the I-AA mid-majors.

How can this gap be closed?

Obviously, putting a competitive product on the field would be the first step. Over the past three seasons, the only consistently dominant teams in the Ivies have been Penn and Harvard and their attendance figures have remained among the best in I-AA.

Columbia—the Cincinnati Bengals of the Ivy league—rose from the cellar this season after it posted as many Ivy wins in 2003 (3) as it had in the previous three seasons combined. That might be why Columbia was the only bottom tier Ivy school to see an increase in crowd turnout over its 2002 totals.

Another important step would be scheduling home games against high-powered regional schools. Grabbing a nationally-ranked team like Delaware, Villanova, Maine or Colgate can generate the excitement necessary to draw students and alumni out to the old stadium.

Of course, Ivy League restrictions only let member institutions to play an abridged 10-game season, as opposed to the 11 or 12 game schedules that are allowed by the NCAA. With seven of those 10 coming against Ivy rivals and one or possibly two coming against historical nonconference rivals, the flexibility to pursue a game against a top-ranked opponent is lacking.

Adding an extra game to the schedule would seem prudent, but that would be inconsistent with the goal of athletic pursuit as the Ivy League administrators define it (or whatever they’d be inclined to say to mask their deep-seated abhorrence of NCAA football).

Then, there’s the surefire way to generate excitement and increase attendance. The prospect of competing for a national title always seems to get people fired up.

Oh wait, that’s right. We’re not allowed.

—Staff writer Michael R. James can be reached at mrjames@fas.harvard.edu. His column appears every Friday.