There are a lot of things that are quintessential to the UCLA experience: walking up the Hill after a long day of classes, eating ice cream at Diddy Riese and watching some of the best college sports teams in the country. It’s just that the last one may come with the chance to see scores of empty seats.
UCLA’s status as the school with the most NCAA titles may be outdated, but there’s no doubt the school has a prestigious athletic pedigree. Lonzo Ball, Troy Aikman, Russell Westbrook and Chase Utley are some of the many prominent athletes who have graced UCLA’s campus over the last few decades. With future pro athletes and Olympians working to master their crafts, one would expect UCLA to have one of the most rabid and enthusiastic fanbases in all of college sports.
But this is not the case.
Over the years, UCLA has struggled to fill stands, especially in what are known as the revenue sports: football and men’s basketball. The football team has seen attendance fall over the last five years, not even managing to fill out 60,000 seats for the 2018 USC game. Men’s basketball has struggled to sell out Pauley Pavilion. Even though NBA-level talent has passed through the arena, attendance often falls below the 10,000 mark.
There are a lot of reasons that can be suggested for this – it could be lack of appeal, too many other activities to do in Los Angeles or just a cultural distaste toward college athletics at UCLA. At a university that prides itself on athletic achievement, low attendance prompts the question of what this means for the university overall and why people aren’t paying attention.
Since firing a football and men’s basketball coach in consecutive years, it’s fair to say UCLA’s major sports are struggling. Arguably, that’s apparent in fan attendance.
Football has not sold out in the last couple years, but it did average over 76,000 fans – the highest in the Pac-12 – when the team was more successful during the first half of the Jim Mora era, which started in 2012, according to UCLA Athletics. Meanwhile, there’s only been one year in the last four during which the Bruins successfully managed to sell out Pauley Pavilion more than once – during the 2016-2017 season. When powered by Ball and four other future NBA players, UCLA managed a 31-5 record. Beyond that, men’s basketball has cleared the 10,000 mark of attendance a few times but has struggled to regularly sell out.
“When (then-freshman point guard) Ball and (then-freshman forward) T.J. Leaf and that team was assembled, we sold out (seven) of our 18 home games,” said Josh Rebholz, senior associate athletic director for external relations. “That’s (about 13,800 people) every game coming; half the season, you couldn’t even get a ticket.”
It’s true. During conference play that year, students who had already paid for a Den Pass patiently stood in line for hours in an effort to get seats for themselves and their friends. For bigger games like Arizona and USC, some students couldn’t get in because the student section was already over capacity, with lines stretching past the Hill to Gayley Avenue.
Ian May, a fourth-year political science and statistics student, was among those who weren’t able to get into one of those games. May regularly attended games during his first year at UCLA and said these games were the first times he wasn’t able to get in.
“That was the peak fandom I’ve experienced – the disappointment of not being able to go to the game,” May said.
The change in the atmosphere has been palpable for fourth-year applied mathematics student Jordan Leong, who has had a Den Pass since his first year.
“People are pretty fair-weather for basketball,” Leong said. “(The 2016-2017 season) was exciting – it was packed. (The season before that) was pretty empty, (last) year and this year, (it’s been) getting emptier. It’s quieter.”
Success also seems to create higher attendance in the Olympic sports. Gymnastics, which won a national championship in 2018 and has been the subject of viral videos, managed to attract over 10,000 fans – almost a sellout of the over 13,000-seat Pauley Pavilion – for its Jan. 21 match against nonrival opponent Arizona State, according to UCLA Athletics.
When teams are winning and the athletes are playing well, Rebholz said, they’re exciting to watch.
Attendance for the Olympic sports can also be up-and-down and is dependent on factors such as game time and team success, with gymnastics for example only attracting 5,440 for its opening game before the start of winter quarter, showing that there can be a fair amount of volatility in the numbers.
Los Angeles is a city where you can go to a world-famous beach in the morning, take a short hike in the afternoon, spend the night watching arguably the greatest basketball player in the world and you’ll have just the scratched the surface of the city’s entertainment options. To say there’s a lot to do in Los Angeles is an understatement.
You have some of the biggest sports stars in the world, like LeBron James with the Lakers, Clayton Kershaw with the Dodgers and Todd Gurley with the Rams, playing nearly every day. There are shows by big-name artists at venues like the Hollywood Bowl or The Forum in Inglewood every weekend. Practically every movie shown in the U.S. makes a run in LA. Even if those aren’t for you, the beach and mountains are there to explore for only the price of gas.
And Angelenos go to these places and events in large numbers. In December, Childish Gambino sold out The Forum, which holds 17,500. In May, Taylor Swift attracted over 60,000 to the Rose Bowl. Outside entertainment, the numbers are even more staggering, with 6 million people visiting Santa Monica Pier annually and 7 million visiting Big Bear annually.
Considering these diverse and seemingly unlimited options, it can be difficult getting people to attend UCLA athletic events, especially when compared to other sports teams.
“All those things are the competition for us to generate interest for coming to our games, whether they be at Pauley Pavilion, Jackie Robinson Stadium, Easton Stadium, the Rose Bowl, what have you,” Rebholz said.
Raffi Yardimian, a fifth-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student, and Southern California native, grew up a UCLA fan but mentioned the competition from not only pro sports but also USC for his fandom.
“Growing up, my family was into UCLA sports. ... (We were into) sports in general, and we used to watch the Lakers and all the LA teams, except for football – for football we tended to lean toward USC because they had the better program in my mind,” Yardimian said.
The competition with other sports teams can be brutal. USC has a blue-blood football program. The Rams just made the Super Bowl. The Dodgers are two-time defending National League champions. The Kings have won two Stanley Cups in the past decade. The Lakers have won five NBA titles this century. When UCLA sports falter on the field, Angelenos don’t lack other options.
For both UCLA students and fans who aren’t associated with the university, there are always other entertainment options besides going to a UCLA game. To an extent, this isn’t just a challenge that manifests itself at UCLA but at other big-city universities around the country as well.
Georgetown, another school like UCLA that has recently seen its once-prestigious basketball program fall on hard times, struggles to fill out half of its 20,000-seat arena on a regular basis, according to attendance statistics. Much like UCLA, Georgetown is also located in a large city with pro sports team in every major league, not to mention other entertainment options.
While being in one of the most dynamic cities in the world instead of just a college town has a lot of benefits for UCLA, it arguably hurts the fan culture surrounding athletics. Jacob Borcover, an associate director of marketing in UCLA Athletics and University of Arizona alumnus, discussed the differences in trying to appeal to students in LA versus those in a midsize city like Tucson, Arizona.
“LA, you know, students can be at Venice Beach in 25 minutes and they can be in Hollywood in 30 minutes, there’s a ton of things they can do here,” Borcover said. “Tucson is a small town and it’s a college town, and sometimes Arizona athletics is the only show in town. That’s kind of where the differences are.”
The differences between Los Angeles and a place like Tucson might not only show themselves in the number of pro sports teams or things to do – they might also be apparent in the cultural differences between being in a big city and a smaller college town.
Beyond the on-field success or LA’s multitude of other activities, it could just be that culturally, Californians care less about college sports.
When you talk about college football in other parts of the country, especially the South, there’s a clear fervor surrounding it. According to a study by The New York Times, college football does have a level of popularity in the South that doesn’t exist in the rest of the U.S., especially for most states on the West Coast. College football in the South is often called a “religious experience,” with an author linking it to matters of regional pride and as an agent of societal change. This is borne out by Southern college football stadiums making up the majority of the most intimidating venues in college football in a list by 247Sports.com.
May, a former member of the Den Operations Club, which helps to staff Den events and market UCLA Athletics, found this to be true when comparing the attitude of UCLA with those of Southern conferences, such as the Atlantic Coast Conference or Southeastern Conference, the two preeminent college athletics conferences of the South.
“In general, it mostly has to do with the culture around (it). In the ACC or the SEC, football is almost like a religion over there. It has a much higher priority on the daily lives of people in those states compared to here,” May said.
Leong, who is a Bay Area native, felt that in California, the fervor for college sports seen in the South is instead seen in pro leagues, pointing out that while support for his local California Golden Bears has been low as they’ve struggled, pro sports teams have seen more support even when their on-field successes haven’t been at their highest. He noted the popularity of MLB’s San Francisco Giants and the NBA’s Golden State Warriors even before their current dynasties.
Rebholz, who formerly worked at the University of Wyoming and University of Missouri, compared the experiences of college sports in those environments to the one at UCLA.
“It was a rite of passage to go to a football game on a Saturday afternoon. You know, in Wyoming, the entire state shut down to go to Laramie,” Rebholz said.
The same enthusiasm toward sports just isn’t the same in LA. Even when there’s a major sporting event, things like traffic in the city or even other activities easily top sports when it comes to Angelenos, Rebholz said. To an extent, this might just be a matter of identity and the role that UCLA plays in the identity of being an Angeleno.
In a place like Wyoming, where college sports are the only game in town and the University of Wyoming is a clear-cut flagship state school, being a Wyoming Cowboys fan is integral to the identity of a Wyomingite. In a city such as Los Angeles, with 10 pro sports teams and multiple major universities, supporting the Bruins might just not play that same role in civic identity because there are other options to fill it.
That college athletics are less ingrained of UCLA and Los Angeles at-large also might be because of the exceptionally large population of first- and second-generation Americans, who might not have the same generations-long connection to a college or university as others. College athletics in general is a rather uniquely American phenomenon; it’s hard to find many other countries in which equivalents to the NCAA exist in the same size or scale.
“Going to football games every Saturday is part of the culture (in places like Alabama and Michigan) and with the student base at UCLA, a lot of these students had never been to a college football game before coming to UCLA,” Borcover said. “They come from an international background or a background where football’s not everything, and so we definitely try to make students know that it’s part of the college experience here.”
There is an element of truth to this. While I, as a second-generation American, had been to a college football game before stepping on to UCLA’s campus, it was not a major part of sports fandom of New Jersey, the state I’m originally from. There wasn’t a cultural difference between going to a Rutgers or Philadelphia Eagles game – it was just the experience of going to watch a game, with no particular fervor toward the Scarlet Knights.
It’s tough to say what effect the up-and-down nature of support for UCLA sports and the inconsistent performances of the on-field product has had on UCLA’s culture, but there are some potential ones.
Athletics can be a major draw for potential students and can allow for them, especially those who are in the LA area, to form a relationship with the school before they even step foot on campus. Yardimian mentioned the mid-2000s men’s basketball teams, which made three consecutive Final Four runs, helped draw him to UCLA.
For Yardimian, it was important to see a team that gave its all, and he felt that was a reflection of UCLA’s culture.
“If you set standards, win, lose, work hard, it’s about working hard and just giving it your all, competing and everything will work out at the end,” Yardimian said. “If they’re giving it all, they’re giving it their all.”
For students, it can also be a matter of school pride. It’s exciting to know that you’re playing a role in helping your team to victory. It can be a point of pride to know that other teams fear playing in Pauley or the Rose Bowl.
There is also the potential effect that the lack of fans can have on the players on the court, potentially negating UCLA’s home-field advantage. May mentioned he believes a strong fan atmosphere can help to motivate the players on the field – and conversely, bring down the opponents.
“I do think it has an effect on the way our players play on the school. So many other schools you see the student section regularly fills out games. ... I’m sure being a player in that environment, having all those fans cheer for you would really give you a boost,” May said.
It is fair to say that a decline in college sports attendance might not be a UCLA-specific problem, as college football overall saw one of its largest-ever attendance drops in 2018, hinting that this is a national problem.
Athletics has taken several steps to counteract the drop, whether it be having more in-game entertainment, such as halftime shows, or Navy SEAL drops before the start of football games. There have also been more giveaways and in-game promotions to encourage students to come to games, from T-shirt giveaways to vouchers promising free meals at Chick-fil-A.
The athletic department has also made many different marketing efforts to appeal to nonstudents: buying a weekly ad in the Los Angeles Times, dedicating social media staffers for every single sport and creating new ticket packages, such as a $149 bundle guaranteeing sideline seats at the Rose Bowl for the upcoming season.
But in spite of all these efforts, attendance numbers for the marquee sports this year have been low, with both football and men’s basketball enduring some of their worst seasons in school history. While it’s fair to assume that they’ll improve as the teams inevitably rebound, it’s hard not to notice the current swathes of empty seats in Pauley.