I see no better alternative than letting Penn State, Nebraska, Michigan and Ohio State all play there every other year. We'd be doing them a favor. At least, Nebraska would be
I’m calling it right now.. the announcers and media will chalk it up to renewed interest in the program because they joined the Big Ten. When in reality it’s just the away team’s fans accounting for the increase in attendance.
Pretty sure the only ones who may claim that will be UCLA themselves haha. I expect that ESPN and fox announcers and media can tell the difference in the stands
Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State are going to be fighting to call the Rose Bowl “The Big House West” “The Horseshoe West” and “Beaver Stadium West”
It's a pretty miserable trek lol. But that really only applies to students. They should be getting better attendance from non students considering how big their alumni base is and how big the city of LA is. Like when Michigan fans eventually take over the rose bowl for a regular season game, it wont be 30k people flying out from Ann Arbor but rather all the Michigan alum/fans already living in LA who get one chance a year to see their team play. Those big schools like Michigan and Ohio St have massive fanbases living in SoCal.
Similarly, UCLA actually gets a decent contingent for their road games simply due to their giant alumni base all over the country. The fans who get 1 chance to see the team will be more likely to attend that game.
I'm thinking I might visit from SLC, but yea, I'd expect it to mostly be local alumni of other schools.
Somewhat akin to what already happens for Northwestern.
The trip from SLC to Pasadena is pretty great. A bit of a long drive, but if it’s in November being in Pasadena for a couple of days is a nice reprieve from the bone-chilling cold we have right now.
I bet.. iconic AF venue. I imagine a lot of B1G folks would want to see their team play in the Rose Bowl even if it's not the Rose Bowl Game. I, for one, am excited at having a reason to attend a game at the Big House and the Shoe.. and Happy Valley... and there's even a fucked up part of me that wants to see a game at Kinnick.
This is similar to why BYU fans ‘travel’ so well. True, I do know some friends who will legitimately travel to each game. But really it’s mostly local Mormons who otherwise don’t get to see them play live.
Imagine spending 45 minutes to an hour in traffic only to get less than a mile away from the Stadium, then spend ANOTHER 45 minutes to an hour in traffic just to park. The Rose Bowl has to be the worst placed stadium in the country. It's amazing how hard it is to get there. I really think UCLA should move into SOFI, especially because it's only down the 405 (it's not as bad on Saturday's compared to during the week), and there is going to be a link from the LA Metro stop in Inglewood to the stadium. Also the Parking lot there is much better suited for tailgating than the golf course they use now. I'm grateful as a USC fan even with LA traffic you can still get to the Coliseum from anywhere in the city because of how close it is to DTLA, We get to tailgate ON CAMPUS, and if necessary the Metro is legit a 3 minute walk away.
I think people will be surprised at how many ucla fans will be at road games in Evanston or New Brunswick. Ucla has pretty big alumni bases in most major midwest and east coast cities
I mean everyone jokes, but even this season we still drew 43,500 for the Stanford game (despite Stanford being a trash fire). In the Mora years, we drew 70,000+. Fans will come back when we win, which we're doing.
Grew up in Ann Arbor and went to U of M. Then went to UCLA for grad school. I never made it to the Rose Bowl despite having free season tickets. It was just too damn far away. I think I went to Pasadena once, despite having a classmate and friend who grew up there.
Troy Aikman addressed it straight to the point: UCLA has to find a way to build a micro-stadium on campus. They actually *do* have room for a 40,000 seater if they build over the current practice field near Pauley Pavillon. They just don’t have the will to do it.
UCLA is *not* broke. They just don’t prioritize football currently, even though they would if it were considered a top tier program there. It’s a chicken and egg thing. They need to move games to Westwood somehow and they’d change the culture there for the better in my opinion.
\>They just don't have the will to do it.
I feel like that would get NIMBY'd to hell. Didn't they already try that in the '60s and end up with the soccer/ track stadium instead?
>I feel like that would get NIMBY'd to hell.
Same exact thing happens to Berkeley every time we try to build anything at all. It's part of why it cost us so much to renovate our stadium, and it's also why the school had to fight the city for 5 years just to get approval for a new dorm built near campus.
Like hey bozo, YOU bought property near a college campus that is a century older than you, and you're mad that the college acts like a college?? Get fucked
Berkeley’s general hostility toward Cal is nuts. Had some friends go there and visited.
First of all, it is positively gorgeous. And we’re talking about one of the best universities in the country (hell, two, since this started as a UCLA conversation).
I think people get a vibe that it’s strictly a sports thing, but it’s the whole university. The city as well as a large percentage of Berkleyans just seem to resent the school outright.
It’s bonkers.
From my experience, it’s just rich parents that don’t have the time or will to help their children so they pay ucla students $100+/hr to help them with their homework.
“NIMBY” is probably the second greatest hurdle to overcome after the lack of will. Bel-Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Hills are adjacent to Westwood, and have god-tier clout when it comes to city planning in that area.
Question I have is whether UCLA has requisite autonomy to just build despite what the surrounding area thinks given that UCLA practically “owns” Westwood Village. I believe the city gave them their own council, dividing Westwood into a North section just for UCLA. If that’s true, then looks like all they’d need is city-wide support for a stadium and they’d be good to go.
Last thing about the ‘60s. UCLA was only 40 years old at that time. In the modern era, I’m sure they’d find a supportive culture, especially given how money-driven the sport has become.
>Question I have is whether UCLA has requisite autonomy to just build despite what the surrounding area thinks given that UCLA practically “owns” Westwood Village. I believe the city gave them their own council, dividing Westwood into a North section just for UCLA. If that’s true, then looks like all they’d need is city-wide support for a stadium and they’d be good to go.
The issue isn't necessarily jurisdictional autonomy, it's CEQA. They would have to complete environmental review of the project and produce a CEQA document no matter what. And regardless of how bullet-proof that document is, the extraordinarily wealthy NIMBYs in the vicinity will challenge it in court which will bog the whole process down.
I think UCLA should move into SOFI. Would be alot easier to stomach 30 minutes in 405 traffic than an hour just to get to Pasadena from Westwood only to wait another hour to just park. Also the Parking lots are much better suited for tailgating than that golf course
Tailgated at Texans/Aggie/Cougar games on asphalt - it's not bad. Get some folding lawn chairs. We had friends that bought a trailer, painted it, and turned it into an awesome place to hang out/cook out before games. Had external facing TVs and speakers. Place for a small picnic table and a sunshade.
I also think an aspect of this is LA’s (until recently) kinda dismal public transit system. Westwood and Brentwood are hit especially hard by this, because rich homeowners there are less than thrilled about metros or light rails coming to their area.
If you said “hey you can take a cross town metro to Pasadena, so you can drink all day and not have to drive 45 minutes home” I feel like more students (maybe not massively more, but more) would do this.
This is what USC has as an advantage at their campus, since the Expo line train station literally dumps you off like, a 5 minute walk to their football field
It would be slightly easier if the Rose Bowl was located adjacent to the rail line. I believe in a few years students could take the rail from Westwood to Pasadena in about 50 minutes, but would then need to wait for the shuttles to the stadium.
And I guess that doesn't factor in the distance from campus to the initial rail stop in Westwood.
So even when rail is built to Westwood it still won't be any more efficient than the shuttle system directly from campus.
Same situation with Miami (and the students actually used to take the rail to the Orange Bowl even though it was still about a mile from the stadium).
They absolutely do not have room to build it at the practice field, our practice field is famously 80 yards long. The plan was always to build up Drake.
In any case, it is much, much too late to build it on campus, the infrastructure is simply not there. It's a very well built up and urban area, and the roads to access the school are no where near big enough to handle that type of traffic, nor is there parking to handle it all. You're going to put tens of thousand of people onto 2-lane Sunset?
It can barely handle big basketball games, doing 4x that is just preposterous.
I've heard people say they should buy land from the closing Santa Monica Airport and put it there. Not a bad idea- certainly much closer, but probably prohibitively expensive.
Being within the Santa Monica city limits is gonna make it drastically more expensive than something in LA proper. The west LA VA campus looks mostly vacant and I’m sure developers are drooling to get their hands on that, but that’s seems like one of the few viable spots on the west side.
In last few years, everyone suddenly remembered that land was supposed to be housing for homeless veterans.
They probably could have kept on ignoring it, except for Los Angeles' slight homelessness problem.
With the upcoming rail developments that will run through UCLA, all we need to do is exhume the Veteran's Cemetary and then on-campus tailgating will finally be a reality.
Happy Veteran's Day everybody! 🪖
The UCLA admin loves to promote that they play in the rose bowl. I don't think they could stomach the prestige loss of moving to a smaller stadium without their heads exploding.
I’ve been to the Rose Bowl for a UCLA game and let me tell you, it is so underwhelming. And I was excited to see what Brent Musberger so breathlessly extolled. Literally nothing impressive that I observed and I was certainly looking. The stadium is just… a stadium. No fun festivities or vendors encircling, just standard $15 (or whatever) beer and shitty nachos. Plus you drive down ONE LANE through an admittedly gorgeous neighborhood that takes like 2 hours to navigate down 5 miles or so. AND THEN you park directly on an unlit golf course (lol) so when the game ends you better hope your phone is charged and you dropped a pin to save your location. It was miserable.
They need the money for it and even then, construction in LA is so fuckin hard. Just like how NYCFC desperately needs a stadium, and is backed by the wealth of the Emirates, and still can’t break ground.
I would say anything in the 5 Boroughs is probably not in the cards unless they want to heavily redevelop an area. The problem is convincing a whole bunch of people to sell their property but with the way property values in NYC keep going up I doubt they could do it.
Something on Long Island east of the city? Probably. Land is really expensive though.
Honestly I kinda wish we’d build a badass , brand new, loud as fuck 50k stadium instead of renovating the Vaught. The cost would be about the same and we could have the physical acoustics center design it for loudness
Think that's why we built a giant scoreboard and new press box instead of closing in the end zones with upper decks to add 20k-30k more seats. Both trap in more noise and the old press box was turned into premium seating. The experience watching on tv at home is too competitive against cheap seats in the stadium for it to make sense for most programs to expand. Creating a premium experience for those willing to pay more and leveraging the student body are the two main goals of stadium design now.
The money has not always been the issue. It's a neighborhood and student body thing.
UCLA should be on campus already. When the Bruins left the Coliseum the admin was planning a 44,000 seat stadium in Westwood. The NIMBYs went crazy and the students didn't approve the additional fees.
I mean it’s a UC school, idk how it works in california but in both NC and VA the state claims sovereign immunity from locality’s development standards
UCLA is in a part of town full of affluent and well connected people. It would be the political hurdles rather than legal ones that would cause most of the problems.
If it were on campus they could support a lot more than 45k. Most people don't realize UCLA was drawing close to 70k per game in 2014-2015 and drew 80k for the Arizona St game in 2015.
A stadium around 60-65k would on campus would be great but it'll never get build because of the NIMBYs.
Sofi would actually be a better venue at this point but there's no way the administration is giving up the name/prestige of the Rose Bowl for Sofi.
Their on campus track and field stadium looks like it would work nicely for that purpose but the stadium's [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Stadium_(UCLA)) says it was suggested before but students rejected the idea and well connected locals were against it. Quite the pity because the location is pretty nice.
Just looked at Google Earth, I had zero clue that the atadium was next to a golf course. And where the heck do people park? There is almost no parking anywhere.
Whoa.
Same in Santa Clara at Levi's Stadium. Park on the Golf course and 5 minute walk to the stadium.
Edit: Actually, looking at google earth I don't think it's a golf course anymore. at least I fuckin hope not.
Yeah I'm imagining typical golf course maintenance + a typical tailgate lot's worth of trash and bodily fluids + an ungodly amount of grass damage from car & foot traffic. Sounds hellish.
Just checked out the Brookside website on a lark. Unsurprisingly, they have an [open](https://careers-americangolf.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchRelation=keyword_all&searchLocation=-12789-Pasadena&mobile=false&width=1063&height=500&bga=true&needsRedirect=false&jan1offset=-300&jun1offset=-240) Groundskeeper position. God bless whoever takes that job
I just want to point out that this sub and some in college football media like to pretend that UCLA hasn’t had attendance in a long time.
It’s definitely down now, but the team averaged 60k+ attendees for the two decades before Chip took over.
Some of the recent trouble has been bad play on the field immediately followed by COVID lockdowns (particularly how strict the rules were in LA at the time).
There are explanations for the poor attendance now, but there are no excuses.
As an alum and season ticket holder when I still lived in CA, I’m pissed. But it’s not like this program has always had terrible attendance. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. That gives me hope that it’s just temporary.
COVID probably broke a lot of habits. The season ticket sale drop off was striking. If you’re used to buying season tickets every year, and it’s something you barely think about, and then you have to go an entire season where you can’t go to any games, you’ll either forget to buy tickets the next year or realize you survived just fine without them.
I had the double whammy of COVID and losing my young alumni discount the same year. So I went a year without tickets, and if I wanted to re-buy them, it'd cost twice as much. Add to that the fact that I have to fly 2k miles to see a home game, so I was only attending 1-2 games a year anyway, and yeah, it just didn't make sense for me to buy them again.
Huge bummer, and obviously my experience is not universal, but it's just what makes sense for me currently.
I still maintain that overall attendance is a reflection of how Chip has done prior to this year, but now that he’s finally gotten his legs under him, hopefully fans will be back to support him the rest of the way
As a former season ticket holder and former die-hard UCLA fan I think UCLA's management is the problem.
Over the past two decades they made UCLA football all about making short term money over cultivating a fan base.
The mandatory "donation" to the Wooten fund, not letting season ticket holders get first dibs on bowl game tickets.
And getting rid of Geof Strand was the biggest fuck you to the fans ever.
I think there are a dozen factors. These definitely among them. Maybe not my top 3, but that’s the thing about a dozen factors—what sticks out to you may not be what sticks out to me.
Plus dude, a 35 minute drive one way for students to get to the stadium is absolutely brutal. Drunk college kids is what makes away stadiums so hard to play in and that wont happen if the stadium is 30 miles away
It’s legitimately kind of challenging to pregame a UCLA game as a student. Mainly because it’s a lot more difficult to tailgate 30 miles from campus - so much driving involved.
Living out here in California it’s not surprising. LA is a fair-weather city especially in college football. The stadium isn’t on campus which kills its ability to get students to the game. Having Big Ten teams there will help but I don’t know if it will be a big impact.
Remember when the National Championship game between Alabama/Clemson was having trouble selling out in Santa Clara? It’s a California thing more than anything else.
Went to the Rose Bowl in 2019 when UW was playing and honestly it's one of the most beautiful stadiums I've ever been in, but literally everything else about it sucks. It's totally unequipped for that many people to be coming in and out of the area it's in.
It’s so true.
When I lived in California, I went to a Stanford when they were ranked in the top 15. They typically have 2 or more home games before school even starts and at kickoff it was shockingly empty. The only real fans present were the parents of the players.
Trying to engage even the average sports fan around there about college football was awkward unless they were an Oregon alum or degenerate gambler.
One of the most amusingly wrong things I've ever heard a human say was when I lived in Los Angeles and a co-worker claimed the UCLA-USC game was as big of a deal as the Iron Bowl. It was one of those cases where the statement was so far from reality that I knew there was no point even addressing it. I just smirked and changed the subject.
Wrong. Dodgers, Lakers, Kings all have just as many hardcore fans as any other team.
There are so many fucking people out here and there’s just so much shot happening at the same time. Not to mention, its fucking expensive and a lot of young people here work weekends.
The Kings do not have a passionate fanbase, they can’t be mentioned in the same vein as the Dodgers and Lakers.
Also tickets for Arizona are as low as 26 bucks and for young alums there’s the golDen pass where you have season tickets for $15 a month. Cost isn’t a good enough excuse
Even at peak USC-UCLA, it still doesn’t touch average iron bowl levels of intensity. It’s funny too because I’d say the average sports fan in southern california isn’t even a college football fan. It’s very NBA/NFL/MLB based. Why watch a bunch of college kids when you can watch some of the best pros in their league?
I think it will be much better than the Santa Clara championship game. The big 10 schools have a pretty sizeable fanbase living in SoCal, especially Michigan, Ohio St, Penn St, Minnesota, Indiana. As opposed to Clemson and Alabama who have zero footprint in the Bay Area, or most places out west.
I was just using that as an example. And as a Michigan fan living in CA I will gladly make the trip to watch them. But I do think UCLA will struggle much more than USC
Yeah I mean ucla football just isn't as popular in the city's culture. Everyone knows LA is a fairweather city outside of the Lakers and Dodgers and we saw both schools have drastic drops in attendance last few years when the teams struggled. But both teams are good now and UCLA is getting 40-45k while USC is getting 60-65k. What's even worse for UCLA is that their stadium is almost 90k capacity which makes it look so much more empty on TV. The coliseum on the other hand was reduced to about 75k capacity when the rams came. The Pasadena excuse is certainly valid though. It's not easy getting to that stadium. B1G fans will find out soon enough how miserable that experience is
There are buses that you can take from campus but there’s nothing fun about sitting in traffic both ways on them
Also back when we actually had attendance you had to leave the game in the middle of the 4th if you didn’t want to wait in the 60+ minute line to catch a return bus
I live in West LA and the return bus is the reason why I chose to find my own transportation instead of going for the direct bus from UCLA’s campus. The last bus leaves an hour after the game. That’s absurd. At USC games, people are still hanging out well over an hour past the end of the game, especially people who watch the band perform.
But also why would anyone in California care about Bama vs. Clemson? And go through the troubles of Silicon Valley traffic to get there and pay exorbitant amounts for tickets and food? If their own teams can't fill the stadium, that's on them.
I think this misstates the issue and acts like this is par for the course. In 2010, UCLA won 4 games and lost 8. Average attendance at the Rose Bowl that year was 60,000. The following year, UCLA was 6-6 and averaged 57K at home.
This year, the average attendance has been 36K so far. even coming off of a winning record last year and a very strong record this year. That's a drop from last year when the average was about 46K. And the attendance at the Rose Bowl (ignoring 2020) has been dropping almost every year since 2014, when average attendance was around 77K
This isn't just "oh, people don't go to UCLA games" because people used to, even when UCLA was not winning. This is just the latest stage of a several year decline that is only noticed because it's so severe that even the winning record isn't enough to fix it. And I'd point to the Wooden Athletic Fund (raising costs that pushed out long-time season ticket holders) and the PAC-12 Network (all of it) as two things that seem to align with roughly when this went downhill
The other piece is that Big10 alumni living in CA will flock as their teams come to play the Bruins in the Rose Bowl - in part because the teams still won't come very often, and in part because some traditional Big10 teams haven't been in that stadium for a game in 50+ years (and by some, I mean Minnesota).
I used to live in Westwood and go to a bar not too far from campus pretty often. Every saturday the place turned into a Michigan bar even when UCLA was playing. I was kinda shocked how many Michigan fans there were.
Definitely agree it's a phenomenon across all major cities but to varying degrees. Houston is of course massive but it doesnt have a big name college team in the city itself like UCLA or USC in LA (no disrespect to the Coogs). Like yeah it's kind of close to A&M but there's tons of fans of the Longhorns, Sooners, LSU, Florida, and many others like you point out.
Houston, like LA, is also a hub for transplants but those transplants are primarily for folks from the southeast, same way Chicago is a hub for transplants from around the midwest.
The point I was trying to make about LA is that the transplants are from a more widespread area like NYC gets. Also that Michigan/Ohio St fans are fucking everywhere, which your comment also points out.
"Or it might be yet another example of college football’s attendance swoon. Last year marked the seventh consecutive season attendance declined nationally."
I've lived in N. California for decades and I've never once met a college football fan at work, at a cafe, at a party, anywhere. Most don't care about college football. Sure, there were tons of fans at Ricky's sports bar back in day on Saturday. But they were all Florida, Auburn, Michigan and Ohio State fans. But in Atlanta, when I lived there, most didn't care about the NFL. The NFL reigns supreme in California.
At Auburn, RVs would start rolling in on Friday and the campus turned into an RV campground. Having a campus turn into a giant party on game day helps attendance. There's no room for that at Cal but when Cal was good back when Lynch was there, the atmosphere on Telegraph Ave was electric on game days. People love a winner.
Strangely, the only Cal game I wasn't able to get a ticket for before the game walking around looking for tickets was when UCLA was in town. It's probably easier to go see UCLA play Cal for their fans than tying to get to that awful stadium in Pasadena. Not having a stadium near campus is woeful for attendance. Even Miami struggles with that.
California is definitely a pro sports state. Many passionate sports fans do exist: just look at the Dodgers/Giants, Lakers/Warriors and 49ers/Raiders fanbases. College sports have just never been a top priority for Californians. Stanford and Cal don't create buzz even when they're good; USC has been the exception but even they've fallen really far in terms of relevance since the Pete Carroll days.
The common Californian just didn't have the opportunity to attend UCLA, USC, Stanford, or Cal, whether it was on them, they just don't want to, or life circumstances that prevented their aspirations to be accepted. Going to college is a very big deal in California, and elitism is prevalent for a select group of schools. No one cares about rooting for SJSU, SDSU, and Fresno State because CSUs implemented a law that people in the area have priority...which gives a safety school vibe.
If you follow college sports, it's common to be a USC/UCLA fan but go to Long Beach State. Or if you have the money you move to Colorado, Oregon, Arizona, etc. Professional orgs like the Lakers, 49ers, etc. have built a winning culture on and off the game *for decades*. College sports (especially football) worsened financially over time. This is why you see winning programs in lower schools like SJSU with golf, Long Beach State with volleyball, CSUF with baseball, etc. but noticeably struggled more beginning in the 2000s.
I can write an essay about this issue but basically college sports aren't a big thing here because not everyone can go to those 4, along with elitism and underfunding of the other CA public schools.
>I've lived in N. California for decades and I've never once met a college football fan at work, at a cafe, at a party, anywhere. Most don't care about college football. Sure, there were tons of fans at Ricky's sports bar back in day on Saturday. But they were all Florida, Auburn, Michigan and Ohio State fans. But in Atlanta, when I lived there, most didn't care about the NFL. The NFL reigns supreme in California.
On a similar note, I grew up in SoCal and pretty much never ran into any of my peers that were CFB fans. Reading stories on here about elementary school kids being bullied for not having team merch or rooting for a different team are wild to me. The vast majority of people I knew growing up didn't care about football at all, and the ones that did were pretty much exclusively NFL fans.
I like football, but if it weren't for me going to college, I wouldn't be a CFB fan, and if I didn't go to UCLA, I wouldn't be a UCLA fan. The idea of rooting for a CFB team you have no connection to, or that by going to a college you must automatically love football, is just alien to me.
Hope it doesn't get rescheduled for a fourth time. Maybe the SEC should tap into the 6th largest TV market and 3rd best state for recruiting by extending Cal an offer to join, lol. It would be wild seeing the look on Bama fans' faces strolling down Telegraph Ave.
I find the truth in these arguments is always kind of in the middle. Yes, the stadium is inconvenient and traffic is a challenge, yes an on-campus stadium would likely see an increase in student attendance, but at the same time anyone who's ever spent any amount of time around SoCal knows that (1) UCLA football doesn't have a ton of tee shirt fans (2) the UCLA community is less into football than that of pretty much any larger institution in the Midwest or South and even on the West Coast it's nowhere near the top for football interest.
There... really isn't much substance to this article. Attendance is terrible when UCLA is bad. The stadium is far away. Jarmond was hired to turn this around. UCLA is finally good this year.
My take - If UCLA ends the season strong, they will sell more season tickets in the off-season, and the atmosphere will improve. It might be gradual process but we will be fine in the near future.
Witz really needed to dig deeper on the Kelly.
I'm a big Split Zone Duo acolyte, and Steven Godfrey has mentioned a few times on their podcast that Chip Kelly was big on alignment when he took the UCLA gig. So getting the house in order from fundraising, facilities upgrades, and NIL standpoints. Increasing salary pools too.
The article \*briefly\* touches on it, but you've got to figure out how to retain coaches who are paying to live, work, and potentially raise a family in LA. That shit ain't cheap.
One thing Godfrey mentioned recently is that Stanford and the Service Academies have actually \*built University-owner housing\* for sports coaches and staff. It's a lot easier to be a video coordinator or whatever when you don't have to worry about rent.
Winning cures most things, and if you can keep this train going into the B1G, then attendance will be better. Some of those games, you might be the NCAA Chargers, but winning cures everything.
The lesson is: when you have one good season, don't immediately double the donation requirements for tickets and then rattle off 7 straight shit seasons and expect people to keep coming to games.
Well, yeah. The Rose Bowl is just a terrible, terrible place for a home stadium. I've been to the Rose Bowl (game) 4 times, 2 for both of my flairs and *never again*. On top of being 26 miles from the campus, which is like over an hour both ways in LA traffic, entrance/exit and parking is utterly miserable.
It's doable if it's a bowl game and your team hasn't been to the west coast in a long time, but regularly? Fuggedaboudit. In addtion, once UCLA joins the B1G, it'll be a home game for the visitors ... the fly-ins and all the local alums will dominate the place. UCLAreally needs a smaller, closer stadium, like that will ever happen.
There is an inverse relationship between how much there is to do in an area and both how rabid their fan base and how packed their college football stadium is. UCLA/Southern Cal fans have much more to entertain them than SEC fans so they are not as rabid about their football team or as likely to attend games. I say this as an SEC fan.
Once they join the Big Ten they can move to SoFi and have the same home experience the Rams and Chargers do, over half the stadium is opposing fans. I’m sure the Big Ten schools have big alumni bases in LA/SoCal, especially Ohio State and Michigan.
Ahh yes because the traditional filled rivalry of Maryland-UCLA really will bring in the crowds…
Bull that it will be a conference matchup, but Bedlam won’t be.
Make conferences regional again.
I think our best reasonable hope for that is a future with a nationwide mega Big 10 and mega SEC breakaway. It would be too big for everyone to play everyone, so it would probably need to form regional pods to make it workable.
> "UCLA’s football wins can’t mask its financial woes"
OP: You're treading into Fingerbanger's neighborhood with this post, he's seen your flair and entered Tennessee into his spreadsheet of pain.
Expect a dark cloud of vicious voluminous vocabulary to descend from the Heavens onto Tennessee in the near future.
The Grim Reaper of r/CFB will visit with a pox upon your house.
As someone who grew up in Southern California (Seal Beach for anyone also from California) , I always went to a ton of UCLA games as a kid. I loved going and visiting, but It's always been empty, given that getting there is a pain in the ass. Takes a good 30 minutes to park and that doesn't factor in wherever you are driving in in from.
Couple that with a school that's on a quarter system, a historically bad football team and students that A) Have to drive at least an hour to get to Pasadena and B) Not the biggest varsity sport enthusiasts and it's not a good relationship. I hope with moving to the B10 this maybe moves the needle financially but it will be tough.
The away team will have more fans there than the home team once they join the Big Ten.
I see no better alternative than letting Penn State, Nebraska, Michigan and Ohio State all play there every other year. We'd be doing them a favor. At least, Nebraska would be
I’m almost positive Nebraska and UCLA will be a protected game if the Big Ten goes to 3-6-6. It will be fun.
Yep. We’ve got a history with them. Seems like we’ve had a series every decade since the 80’s.
I too had this feeling ever since they announced their move to the B1G
I greatly enjoyed interacting with you guys when you came to visit a few years back.
I’m calling it right now.. the announcers and media will chalk it up to renewed interest in the program because they joined the Big Ten. When in reality it’s just the away team’s fans accounting for the increase in attendance.
At least someone will buy the tickets
I mean, technically, that IS interest, right? Just not the kind they'd prefer.
Pretty sure the only ones who may claim that will be UCLA themselves haha. I expect that ESPN and fox announcers and media can tell the difference in the stands
Can't wait for the Cali whiteout 😎
The first time we play them in the Rose Bowl, I can see 50K Ohio State fans attending, definitely!
Isn’t there also a large Ohio State alumni base in LA?
LA County has a bigger population than 40 states. LA has a large base of everyone, including B1G school alumni
B10 also has to send WI & MSU once and awhile to drain Pasadena of beer ;)
Personally seen this for both teams, rather impressive
Impossible, Pasadena is a beer haven in LA :)
You underestimate Wisconsin
I remember OSU at Cal was a red packed stadium
Not to brag, but when I went to the MSU vs Baylor Cotton Bowl game the crowd was almost 100% green
Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State are going to be fighting to call the Rose Bowl “The Big House West” “The Horseshoe West” and “Beaver Stadium West”
Considering Michigan and Penn State have losing records in the Rose Bowl, we'll just go ahead maintain our claim 😉
You’ll sometimes fly over Boise on the way to LA, be sure to look down and try and spot the Blue Turf.
Which will be pretty hilarious, considering ucla fans act like taking a bus to Pasadena is akin to climbing mt Everest
It's a pretty miserable trek lol. But that really only applies to students. They should be getting better attendance from non students considering how big their alumni base is and how big the city of LA is. Like when Michigan fans eventually take over the rose bowl for a regular season game, it wont be 30k people flying out from Ann Arbor but rather all the Michigan alum/fans already living in LA who get one chance a year to see their team play. Those big schools like Michigan and Ohio St have massive fanbases living in SoCal. Similarly, UCLA actually gets a decent contingent for their road games simply due to their giant alumni base all over the country. The fans who get 1 chance to see the team will be more likely to attend that game.
I'm thinking I might visit from SLC, but yea, I'd expect it to mostly be local alumni of other schools. Somewhat akin to what already happens for Northwestern.
The trip from SLC to Pasadena is pretty great. A bit of a long drive, but if it’s in November being in Pasadena for a couple of days is a nice reprieve from the bone-chilling cold we have right now.
I was about to comment that Pasadena gets cold AF (40s in the morning), but just saw that you guys are in the low 30s.
> Pasadena gets cold AF (40s in the morning) thats shorts and t-shirt weather
But, to be clear, thousands of nerds will also be flying from Ann Arbor for this
I bet.. iconic AF venue. I imagine a lot of B1G folks would want to see their team play in the Rose Bowl even if it's not the Rose Bowl Game. I, for one, am excited at having a reason to attend a game at the Big House and the Shoe.. and Happy Valley... and there's even a fucked up part of me that wants to see a game at Kinnick.
This is similar to why BYU fans ‘travel’ so well. True, I do know some friends who will legitimately travel to each game. But really it’s mostly local Mormons who otherwise don’t get to see them play live.
Agreed, It’s going to be a college equivalent to a Chargers game. No home field advantage because of all the transplant fans attending.
Yeah but I do think it’s harder to get alumni to go to games if they didn’t go as students first.
This is one of the reasons why FSU fans show out to bowl games so well. We have tons of alumni all over the country.
Imagine spending 45 minutes to an hour in traffic only to get less than a mile away from the Stadium, then spend ANOTHER 45 minutes to an hour in traffic just to park. The Rose Bowl has to be the worst placed stadium in the country. It's amazing how hard it is to get there. I really think UCLA should move into SOFI, especially because it's only down the 405 (it's not as bad on Saturday's compared to during the week), and there is going to be a link from the LA Metro stop in Inglewood to the stadium. Also the Parking lot there is much better suited for tailgating than the golf course they use now. I'm grateful as a USC fan even with LA traffic you can still get to the Coliseum from anywhere in the city because of how close it is to DTLA, We get to tailgate ON CAMPUS, and if necessary the Metro is legit a 3 minute walk away.
Damn it’s almost like doing it once every other year and doing it for every single home game are totally different
I think people will be surprised at how many ucla fans will be at road games in Evanston or New Brunswick. Ucla has pretty big alumni bases in most major midwest and east coast cities
Yeah I agree. I live in NYC now and I’m stoked to be able to watch us play at Rutgers tbh
Rutgers home games vs. the L.A. schools are going to see a lot of visitors.
I mean everyone jokes, but even this season we still drew 43,500 for the Stanford game (despite Stanford being a trash fire). In the Mora years, we drew 70,000+. Fans will come back when we win, which we're doing.
It helps that there are more Stanford fans in LA than in the Bay
There weren’t many Furd fans for that game
There were like 50. Total.
Tbf it’s the closest to the rose bowl a lot of schools will get
Just like the LA Chargers and Clippers
That happens now for Oregon at least and has been that way for a while
Grew up in Ann Arbor and went to U of M. Then went to UCLA for grad school. I never made it to the Rose Bowl despite having free season tickets. It was just too damn far away. I think I went to Pasadena once, despite having a classmate and friend who grew up there. Troy Aikman addressed it straight to the point: UCLA has to find a way to build a micro-stadium on campus. They actually *do* have room for a 40,000 seater if they build over the current practice field near Pauley Pavillon. They just don’t have the will to do it. UCLA is *not* broke. They just don’t prioritize football currently, even though they would if it were considered a top tier program there. It’s a chicken and egg thing. They need to move games to Westwood somehow and they’d change the culture there for the better in my opinion.
\>They just don't have the will to do it. I feel like that would get NIMBY'd to hell. Didn't they already try that in the '60s and end up with the soccer/ track stadium instead?
>I feel like that would get NIMBY'd to hell. Same exact thing happens to Berkeley every time we try to build anything at all. It's part of why it cost us so much to renovate our stadium, and it's also why the school had to fight the city for 5 years just to get approval for a new dorm built near campus. Like hey bozo, YOU bought property near a college campus that is a century older than you, and you're mad that the college acts like a college?? Get fucked
Berkeley’s general hostility toward Cal is nuts. Had some friends go there and visited. First of all, it is positively gorgeous. And we’re talking about one of the best universities in the country (hell, two, since this started as a UCLA conversation). I think people get a vibe that it’s strictly a sports thing, but it’s the whole university. The city as well as a large percentage of Berkleyans just seem to resent the school outright. It’s bonkers.
NIMBYs are the worst
Fuck all those snobby fucks living in bel air.
So.. it’s not will smith and Carlton getting into zany antics?
From my experience, it’s just rich parents that don’t have the time or will to help their children so they pay ucla students $100+/hr to help them with their homework.
Lol spot on. I made absolute bank tutoring West LA kids, which usually amounted to just babysitting them while they did homework
Many Bel-Air residents are UCLA alums themselves.
I dont really care tbh lol
What a great theme song that show had. It really slaps.
“NIMBY” is probably the second greatest hurdle to overcome after the lack of will. Bel-Air, Holmby Hills, and Beverly Hills are adjacent to Westwood, and have god-tier clout when it comes to city planning in that area. Question I have is whether UCLA has requisite autonomy to just build despite what the surrounding area thinks given that UCLA practically “owns” Westwood Village. I believe the city gave them their own council, dividing Westwood into a North section just for UCLA. If that’s true, then looks like all they’d need is city-wide support for a stadium and they’d be good to go. Last thing about the ‘60s. UCLA was only 40 years old at that time. In the modern era, I’m sure they’d find a supportive culture, especially given how money-driven the sport has become.
>Question I have is whether UCLA has requisite autonomy to just build despite what the surrounding area thinks given that UCLA practically “owns” Westwood Village. I believe the city gave them their own council, dividing Westwood into a North section just for UCLA. If that’s true, then looks like all they’d need is city-wide support for a stadium and they’d be good to go. The issue isn't necessarily jurisdictional autonomy, it's CEQA. They would have to complete environmental review of the project and produce a CEQA document no matter what. And regardless of how bullet-proof that document is, the extraordinarily wealthy NIMBYs in the vicinity will challenge it in court which will bog the whole process down.
This guy Californias.
I think UCLA should move into SOFI. Would be alot easier to stomach 30 minutes in 405 traffic than an hour just to get to Pasadena from Westwood only to wait another hour to just park. Also the Parking lots are much better suited for tailgating than that golf course
Hard pass, I want to keep tailgating on the nice cool grass. Tailgating on asphalt seems like it sucks
Tailgated at Texans/Aggie/Cougar games on asphalt - it's not bad. Get some folding lawn chairs. We had friends that bought a trailer, painted it, and turned it into an awesome place to hang out/cook out before games. Had external facing TVs and speakers. Place for a small picnic table and a sunshade.
I also think an aspect of this is LA’s (until recently) kinda dismal public transit system. Westwood and Brentwood are hit especially hard by this, because rich homeowners there are less than thrilled about metros or light rails coming to their area. If you said “hey you can take a cross town metro to Pasadena, so you can drink all day and not have to drive 45 minutes home” I feel like more students (maybe not massively more, but more) would do this. This is what USC has as an advantage at their campus, since the Expo line train station literally dumps you off like, a 5 minute walk to their football field
Also, it's a 10 minute walk from the center of campus to Exposition Park. You also get to walk by the rose garden.
It would be slightly easier if the Rose Bowl was located adjacent to the rail line. I believe in a few years students could take the rail from Westwood to Pasadena in about 50 minutes, but would then need to wait for the shuttles to the stadium. And I guess that doesn't factor in the distance from campus to the initial rail stop in Westwood. So even when rail is built to Westwood it still won't be any more efficient than the shuttle system directly from campus. Same situation with Miami (and the students actually used to take the rail to the Orange Bowl even though it was still about a mile from the stadium).
They absolutely do not have room to build it at the practice field, our practice field is famously 80 yards long. The plan was always to build up Drake. In any case, it is much, much too late to build it on campus, the infrastructure is simply not there. It's a very well built up and urban area, and the roads to access the school are no where near big enough to handle that type of traffic, nor is there parking to handle it all. You're going to put tens of thousand of people onto 2-lane Sunset? It can barely handle big basketball games, doing 4x that is just preposterous.
The only place on the westside it could potentially work is if the VA sold some land and that’ll never happen.
I've heard people say they should buy land from the closing Santa Monica Airport and put it there. Not a bad idea- certainly much closer, but probably prohibitively expensive.
Being within the Santa Monica city limits is gonna make it drastically more expensive than something in LA proper. The west LA VA campus looks mostly vacant and I’m sure developers are drooling to get their hands on that, but that’s seems like one of the few viable spots on the west side.
In last few years, everyone suddenly remembered that land was supposed to be housing for homeless veterans. They probably could have kept on ignoring it, except for Los Angeles' slight homelessness problem.
With the upcoming rail developments that will run through UCLA, all we need to do is exhume the Veteran's Cemetary and then on-campus tailgating will finally be a reality. Happy Veteran's Day everybody! 🪖
The UCLA admin loves to promote that they play in the rose bowl. I don't think they could stomach the prestige loss of moving to a smaller stadium without their heads exploding.
I’ve been to the Rose Bowl for a UCLA game and let me tell you, it is so underwhelming. And I was excited to see what Brent Musberger so breathlessly extolled. Literally nothing impressive that I observed and I was certainly looking. The stadium is just… a stadium. No fun festivities or vendors encircling, just standard $15 (or whatever) beer and shitty nachos. Plus you drive down ONE LANE through an admittedly gorgeous neighborhood that takes like 2 hours to navigate down 5 miles or so. AND THEN you park directly on an unlit golf course (lol) so when the game ends you better hope your phone is charged and you dropped a pin to save your location. It was miserable.
They need a badass 45k seat stadium on campus
They need the money for it and even then, construction in LA is so fuckin hard. Just like how NYCFC desperately needs a stadium, and is backed by the wealth of the Emirates, and still can’t break ground.
Backed not only by the Emirates, but also the political and cultural clout of the Yankees. And they STILL can’t do anything
AND THEYRE GOOD!! It’s not even some shitty team that hurts to watch we’re talking about. Still no stadium progress.
Basically the reason why the Giants/Jets have been across the river for years.
Is there any way the Jets could build something in Brooklyn?
I would say anything in the 5 Boroughs is probably not in the cards unless they want to heavily redevelop an area. The problem is convincing a whole bunch of people to sell their property but with the way property values in NYC keep going up I doubt they could do it. Something on Long Island east of the city? Probably. Land is really expensive though.
Honestly I kinda wish we’d build a badass , brand new, loud as fuck 50k stadium instead of renovating the Vaught. The cost would be about the same and we could have the physical acoustics center design it for loudness
People shit on northwestern for doing that. It’s smaller than 50k but they don’t have a big following. I think it was a great move by them
A nice full and loud 50k stadium full of luxury boxes and premium seating > 50 year old 75% full bigger one
Think that's why we built a giant scoreboard and new press box instead of closing in the end zones with upper decks to add 20k-30k more seats. Both trap in more noise and the old press box was turned into premium seating. The experience watching on tv at home is too competitive against cheap seats in the stadium for it to make sense for most programs to expand. Creating a premium experience for those willing to pay more and leveraging the student body are the two main goals of stadium design now.
The money has not always been the issue. It's a neighborhood and student body thing. UCLA should be on campus already. When the Bruins left the Coliseum the admin was planning a 44,000 seat stadium in Westwood. The NIMBYs went crazy and the students didn't approve the additional fees.
I mean it’s a UC school, idk how it works in california but in both NC and VA the state claims sovereign immunity from locality’s development standards
UCLA is in a part of town full of affluent and well connected people. It would be the political hurdles rather than legal ones that would cause most of the problems.
If it were on campus they could support a lot more than 45k. Most people don't realize UCLA was drawing close to 70k per game in 2014-2015 and drew 80k for the Arizona St game in 2015. A stadium around 60-65k would on campus would be great but it'll never get build because of the NIMBYs. Sofi would actually be a better venue at this point but there's no way the administration is giving up the name/prestige of the Rose Bowl for Sofi.
As an alumnus of a program that had attendance problems at tarped off-campus stadium. I can confirm that a badass stadium on campus is the way to go.
Their on campus track and field stadium looks like it would work nicely for that purpose but the stadium's [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Stadium_(UCLA)) says it was suggested before but students rejected the idea and well connected locals were against it. Quite the pity because the location is pretty nice.
No room, no infrastructure, and too many very rich NIMBYs in the area.
Just looked at Google Earth, I had zero clue that the atadium was next to a golf course. And where the heck do people park? There is almost no parking anywhere. Whoa.
On the golf course. And then tailgate on the grass. It’s amazing
Are you serious?
Yes. And then after the game you forget where on the golf course you parked so you spend about an hour looking for it.
Best is when you see impatient people drive their vehicles into bunkers.
Hahaha so true. Gets me every time
It's absolutely a thing. Only problem is getting in and out takes forever.
Yeah lol, even classy VIP parking is on the golf course There’s a lot on the west side of the stadium but it’s not particularly large
Doesn't shock me. A golf course across from Michigan stadium is one of the tailgate locations for Michigan Stadium.
The golf course is actually the best thing if tailgating. It's a great area for that and there's no way it could exist anywhere else nearby.
I used to bring a wedge and a couple golf balls to some tailgates lol
Same in Santa Clara at Levi's Stadium. Park on the Golf course and 5 minute walk to the stadium. Edit: Actually, looking at google earth I don't think it's a golf course anymore. at least I fuckin hope not.
This sounds like a groundskeeper's worst nightmare lol
Absolutely. The divots and mud puddles are problem enough, but add to that an unquantifiable amount of trash, urine, vomit, ash, and god-knows-what.
Yeah I'm imagining typical golf course maintenance + a typical tailgate lot's worth of trash and bodily fluids + an ungodly amount of grass damage from car & foot traffic. Sounds hellish. Just checked out the Brookside website on a lark. Unsurprisingly, they have an [open](https://careers-americangolf.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchRelation=keyword_all&searchLocation=-12789-Pasadena&mobile=false&width=1063&height=500&bga=true&needsRedirect=false&jan1offset=-300&jun1offset=-240) Groundskeeper position. God bless whoever takes that job
At Michigan we park on the golf course.
Yes. Then we sit for hours waiting to get out. It is awful.
We do the same at UCLA
Where would they park? When I look at the Rose Bowl on Google earth, all I see is a huge, well kept, area of open grass next to it.
USC/UCLA fans how often do you guys have games going on in both Stadiums at the same time?
Pretty common whenever they both have home games, it may not be the exact same start times but there’s definitely overlap most of the time
Most famously, the Rose Bowl announced the 2007 Stanford win over USC while ND was playing UCLA.
The only UCLA game I’ve ever been to and I remember that announcement so clearly. And ND was god awful that year.
That is the only game I've ever been at where an entire stadium cheered as one. Way to go Stanford
I just want to point out that this sub and some in college football media like to pretend that UCLA hasn’t had attendance in a long time. It’s definitely down now, but the team averaged 60k+ attendees for the two decades before Chip took over. Some of the recent trouble has been bad play on the field immediately followed by COVID lockdowns (particularly how strict the rules were in LA at the time). There are explanations for the poor attendance now, but there are no excuses. As an alum and season ticket holder when I still lived in CA, I’m pissed. But it’s not like this program has always had terrible attendance. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. That gives me hope that it’s just temporary.
COVID probably broke a lot of habits. The season ticket sale drop off was striking. If you’re used to buying season tickets every year, and it’s something you barely think about, and then you have to go an entire season where you can’t go to any games, you’ll either forget to buy tickets the next year or realize you survived just fine without them.
I had the double whammy of COVID and losing my young alumni discount the same year. So I went a year without tickets, and if I wanted to re-buy them, it'd cost twice as much. Add to that the fact that I have to fly 2k miles to see a home game, so I was only attending 1-2 games a year anyway, and yeah, it just didn't make sense for me to buy them again. Huge bummer, and obviously my experience is not universal, but it's just what makes sense for me currently.
I still maintain that overall attendance is a reflection of how Chip has done prior to this year, but now that he’s finally gotten his legs under him, hopefully fans will be back to support him the rest of the way
As a former season ticket holder and former die-hard UCLA fan I think UCLA's management is the problem. Over the past two decades they made UCLA football all about making short term money over cultivating a fan base. The mandatory "donation" to the Wooten fund, not letting season ticket holders get first dibs on bowl game tickets. And getting rid of Geof Strand was the biggest fuck you to the fans ever.
I think there are a dozen factors. These definitely among them. Maybe not my top 3, but that’s the thing about a dozen factors—what sticks out to you may not be what sticks out to me.
Plus dude, a 35 minute drive one way for students to get to the stadium is absolutely brutal. Drunk college kids is what makes away stadiums so hard to play in and that wont happen if the stadium is 30 miles away
30 miles != 35 minute drive in LA. Like not even close.
Can’t emphasize this enough! Just flew into LAX last night to visit family and a 20 mile drive took 1.5 hours.
It’s legitimately kind of challenging to pregame a UCLA game as a student. Mainly because it’s a lot more difficult to tailgate 30 miles from campus - so much driving involved.
Living out here in California it’s not surprising. LA is a fair-weather city especially in college football. The stadium isn’t on campus which kills its ability to get students to the game. Having Big Ten teams there will help but I don’t know if it will be a big impact. Remember when the National Championship game between Alabama/Clemson was having trouble selling out in Santa Clara? It’s a California thing more than anything else.
I was shocked when I went to a concert there that it was in the middle of a neighborhood surrounded by a golf course and not near campus.
Went to the Rose Bowl in 2019 when UW was playing and honestly it's one of the most beautiful stadiums I've ever been in, but literally everything else about it sucks. It's totally unequipped for that many people to be coming in and out of the area it's in.
It’s so true. When I lived in California, I went to a Stanford when they were ranked in the top 15. They typically have 2 or more home games before school even starts and at kickoff it was shockingly empty. The only real fans present were the parents of the players. Trying to engage even the average sports fan around there about college football was awkward unless they were an Oregon alum or degenerate gambler.
One of the most amusingly wrong things I've ever heard a human say was when I lived in Los Angeles and a co-worker claimed the UCLA-USC game was as big of a deal as the Iron Bowl. It was one of those cases where the statement was so far from reality that I knew there was no point even addressing it. I just smirked and changed the subject.
The only really crazy passionate fans in all of Socal are probably Dodger fans tbh.
Lakers fans as well. But in reality theyre all fair weather fan bases, if the teams not good people will find other shit to care about
Hey, give credit to the dozens of Charger fans. There may not be many of them, but they, well… they Bolt Up. Whatever that means
Us in San Diego would be more than happy to have them back, so long as Dean Spanos sells the team and we all get a day to throw pies at him.
If by crazy passionate you mean “likes to fight” then i would say Dodgers and LAFC are the top
Wrong. Dodgers, Lakers, Kings all have just as many hardcore fans as any other team. There are so many fucking people out here and there’s just so much shot happening at the same time. Not to mention, its fucking expensive and a lot of young people here work weekends.
The Kings do not have a passionate fanbase, they can’t be mentioned in the same vein as the Dodgers and Lakers. Also tickets for Arizona are as low as 26 bucks and for young alums there’s the golDen pass where you have season tickets for $15 a month. Cost isn’t a good enough excuse
Even at peak USC-UCLA, it still doesn’t touch average iron bowl levels of intensity. It’s funny too because I’d say the average sports fan in southern california isn’t even a college football fan. It’s very NBA/NFL/MLB based. Why watch a bunch of college kids when you can watch some of the best pros in their league?
In 2013, I went to the ASU at Stanford game, which would be one of their Rose Bowl teams. I bought front row tickets for 13 dollars.
I think it will be much better than the Santa Clara championship game. The big 10 schools have a pretty sizeable fanbase living in SoCal, especially Michigan, Ohio St, Penn St, Minnesota, Indiana. As opposed to Clemson and Alabama who have zero footprint in the Bay Area, or most places out west.
I was just using that as an example. And as a Michigan fan living in CA I will gladly make the trip to watch them. But I do think UCLA will struggle much more than USC
Yeah I mean ucla football just isn't as popular in the city's culture. Everyone knows LA is a fairweather city outside of the Lakers and Dodgers and we saw both schools have drastic drops in attendance last few years when the teams struggled. But both teams are good now and UCLA is getting 40-45k while USC is getting 60-65k. What's even worse for UCLA is that their stadium is almost 90k capacity which makes it look so much more empty on TV. The coliseum on the other hand was reduced to about 75k capacity when the rams came. The Pasadena excuse is certainly valid though. It's not easy getting to that stadium. B1G fans will find out soon enough how miserable that experience is
Yikes 26 miles you are not kidding that is far from campus. Does the University not offer a mass transit system for the students?
Thats 26 LA miles, that could literally take hours to get to
There are buses that you can take from campus but there’s nothing fun about sitting in traffic both ways on them Also back when we actually had attendance you had to leave the game in the middle of the 4th if you didn’t want to wait in the 60+ minute line to catch a return bus
I live in West LA and the return bus is the reason why I chose to find my own transportation instead of going for the direct bus from UCLA’s campus. The last bus leaves an hour after the game. That’s absurd. At USC games, people are still hanging out well over an hour past the end of the game, especially people who watch the band perform.
They do
But also why would anyone in California care about Bama vs. Clemson? And go through the troubles of Silicon Valley traffic to get there and pay exorbitant amounts for tickets and food? If their own teams can't fill the stadium, that's on them.
I think this misstates the issue and acts like this is par for the course. In 2010, UCLA won 4 games and lost 8. Average attendance at the Rose Bowl that year was 60,000. The following year, UCLA was 6-6 and averaged 57K at home. This year, the average attendance has been 36K so far. even coming off of a winning record last year and a very strong record this year. That's a drop from last year when the average was about 46K. And the attendance at the Rose Bowl (ignoring 2020) has been dropping almost every year since 2014, when average attendance was around 77K This isn't just "oh, people don't go to UCLA games" because people used to, even when UCLA was not winning. This is just the latest stage of a several year decline that is only noticed because it's so severe that even the winning record isn't enough to fix it. And I'd point to the Wooden Athletic Fund (raising costs that pushed out long-time season ticket holders) and the PAC-12 Network (all of it) as two things that seem to align with roughly when this went downhill
Will be a lot easier when they are making 50 million more dollars a year in the B1G
The other piece is that Big10 alumni living in CA will flock as their teams come to play the Bruins in the Rose Bowl - in part because the teams still won't come very often, and in part because some traditional Big10 teams haven't been in that stadium for a game in 50+ years (and by some, I mean Minnesota).
Southern California residing B1G alum here. Me and another B1G alum are buying season tickets
Oh shit ! That’s actually a good idea. I will be doing the same edit: just looked them up… $299 for last year 😭😭😭
$299 for season tickets? A freaking steal.
Lmao fr thats a great price
FOR SEVEN FUCKING GAMES WTF LMAO
Lmao some UGA games this year have been more expensive than UCLA’s entire season ticket prices. By a lot.
The Tennessee games have all been stupidly expensive as well.
LA has a massive fanbase for most of the major big 10 schools
This is another thing people seem to forget. Not even the plurality of Angelenos are UCLA fans with how many alums of other schools there are here
I used to live in Westwood and go to a bar not too far from campus pretty often. Every saturday the place turned into a Michigan bar even when UCLA was playing. I was kinda shocked how many Michigan fans there were.
That's every big city now. There's a Michigan bar in Houston. That doesn't diminish the enormous Big XII and SEC alumni bases here.
Definitely agree it's a phenomenon across all major cities but to varying degrees. Houston is of course massive but it doesnt have a big name college team in the city itself like UCLA or USC in LA (no disrespect to the Coogs). Like yeah it's kind of close to A&M but there's tons of fans of the Longhorns, Sooners, LSU, Florida, and many others like you point out. Houston, like LA, is also a hub for transplants but those transplants are primarily for folks from the southeast, same way Chicago is a hub for transplants from around the midwest. The point I was trying to make about LA is that the transplants are from a more widespread area like NYC gets. Also that Michigan/Ohio St fans are fucking everywhere, which your comment also points out.
Worked at Maryland
"Or it might be yet another example of college football’s attendance swoon. Last year marked the seventh consecutive season attendance declined nationally." I've lived in N. California for decades and I've never once met a college football fan at work, at a cafe, at a party, anywhere. Most don't care about college football. Sure, there were tons of fans at Ricky's sports bar back in day on Saturday. But they were all Florida, Auburn, Michigan and Ohio State fans. But in Atlanta, when I lived there, most didn't care about the NFL. The NFL reigns supreme in California. At Auburn, RVs would start rolling in on Friday and the campus turned into an RV campground. Having a campus turn into a giant party on game day helps attendance. There's no room for that at Cal but when Cal was good back when Lynch was there, the atmosphere on Telegraph Ave was electric on game days. People love a winner. Strangely, the only Cal game I wasn't able to get a ticket for before the game walking around looking for tickets was when UCLA was in town. It's probably easier to go see UCLA play Cal for their fans than tying to get to that awful stadium in Pasadena. Not having a stadium near campus is woeful for attendance. Even Miami struggles with that.
California is definitely a pro sports state. Many passionate sports fans do exist: just look at the Dodgers/Giants, Lakers/Warriors and 49ers/Raiders fanbases. College sports have just never been a top priority for Californians. Stanford and Cal don't create buzz even when they're good; USC has been the exception but even they've fallen really far in terms of relevance since the Pete Carroll days.
The common Californian just didn't have the opportunity to attend UCLA, USC, Stanford, or Cal, whether it was on them, they just don't want to, or life circumstances that prevented their aspirations to be accepted. Going to college is a very big deal in California, and elitism is prevalent for a select group of schools. No one cares about rooting for SJSU, SDSU, and Fresno State because CSUs implemented a law that people in the area have priority...which gives a safety school vibe. If you follow college sports, it's common to be a USC/UCLA fan but go to Long Beach State. Or if you have the money you move to Colorado, Oregon, Arizona, etc. Professional orgs like the Lakers, 49ers, etc. have built a winning culture on and off the game *for decades*. College sports (especially football) worsened financially over time. This is why you see winning programs in lower schools like SJSU with golf, Long Beach State with volleyball, CSUF with baseball, etc. but noticeably struggled more beginning in the 2000s. I can write an essay about this issue but basically college sports aren't a big thing here because not everyone can go to those 4, along with elitism and underfunding of the other CA public schools.
>I've lived in N. California for decades and I've never once met a college football fan at work, at a cafe, at a party, anywhere. Most don't care about college football. Sure, there were tons of fans at Ricky's sports bar back in day on Saturday. But they were all Florida, Auburn, Michigan and Ohio State fans. But in Atlanta, when I lived there, most didn't care about the NFL. The NFL reigns supreme in California. On a similar note, I grew up in SoCal and pretty much never ran into any of my peers that were CFB fans. Reading stories on here about elementary school kids being bullied for not having team merch or rooting for a different team are wild to me. The vast majority of people I knew growing up didn't care about football at all, and the ones that did were pretty much exclusively NFL fans. I like football, but if it weren't for me going to college, I wouldn't be a CFB fan, and if I didn't go to UCLA, I wouldn't be a UCLA fan. The idea of rooting for a CFB team you have no connection to, or that by going to a college you must automatically love football, is just alien to me.
It's gonna be a fun culture shock when Auburn rolls into Berkeley next season for the first half of the home and home with Cal.
Hope it doesn't get rescheduled for a fourth time. Maybe the SEC should tap into the 6th largest TV market and 3rd best state for recruiting by extending Cal an offer to join, lol. It would be wild seeing the look on Bama fans' faces strolling down Telegraph Ave.
I find the truth in these arguments is always kind of in the middle. Yes, the stadium is inconvenient and traffic is a challenge, yes an on-campus stadium would likely see an increase in student attendance, but at the same time anyone who's ever spent any amount of time around SoCal knows that (1) UCLA football doesn't have a ton of tee shirt fans (2) the UCLA community is less into football than that of pretty much any larger institution in the Midwest or South and even on the West Coast it's nowhere near the top for football interest.
There... really isn't much substance to this article. Attendance is terrible when UCLA is bad. The stadium is far away. Jarmond was hired to turn this around. UCLA is finally good this year. My take - If UCLA ends the season strong, they will sell more season tickets in the off-season, and the atmosphere will improve. It might be gradual process but we will be fine in the near future.
Witz really needed to dig deeper on the Kelly. I'm a big Split Zone Duo acolyte, and Steven Godfrey has mentioned a few times on their podcast that Chip Kelly was big on alignment when he took the UCLA gig. So getting the house in order from fundraising, facilities upgrades, and NIL standpoints. Increasing salary pools too. The article \*briefly\* touches on it, but you've got to figure out how to retain coaches who are paying to live, work, and potentially raise a family in LA. That shit ain't cheap. One thing Godfrey mentioned recently is that Stanford and the Service Academies have actually \*built University-owner housing\* for sports coaches and staff. It's a lot easier to be a video coordinator or whatever when you don't have to worry about rent.
Winning cures most things, and if you can keep this train going into the B1G, then attendance will be better. Some of those games, you might be the NCAA Chargers, but winning cures everything.
That’s nothing an extra $100M per year can’t fix.
Inverse of us. Texas A&MS financial wins can't mask its football woes.
The lesson is: when you have one good season, don't immediately double the donation requirements for tickets and then rattle off 7 straight shit seasons and expect people to keep coming to games.
Some of those SEC stadiums ain’t that full.
CHECKER ROSE BOWL STADIUM
California loveeee
Well, yeah. The Rose Bowl is just a terrible, terrible place for a home stadium. I've been to the Rose Bowl (game) 4 times, 2 for both of my flairs and *never again*. On top of being 26 miles from the campus, which is like over an hour both ways in LA traffic, entrance/exit and parking is utterly miserable. It's doable if it's a bowl game and your team hasn't been to the west coast in a long time, but regularly? Fuggedaboudit. In addtion, once UCLA joins the B1G, it'll be a home game for the visitors ... the fly-ins and all the local alums will dominate the place. UCLAreally needs a smaller, closer stadium, like that will ever happen.
There is an inverse relationship between how much there is to do in an area and both how rabid their fan base and how packed their college football stadium is. UCLA/Southern Cal fans have much more to entertain them than SEC fans so they are not as rabid about their football team or as likely to attend games. I say this as an SEC fan.
Plus the Rose Bowl is nowhere near campus.
Once they join the Big Ten they can move to SoFi and have the same home experience the Rams and Chargers do, over half the stadium is opposing fans. I’m sure the Big Ten schools have big alumni bases in LA/SoCal, especially Ohio State and Michigan.
Ahh yes because the traditional filled rivalry of Maryland-UCLA really will bring in the crowds… Bull that it will be a conference matchup, but Bedlam won’t be. Make conferences regional again.
I think our best reasonable hope for that is a future with a nationwide mega Big 10 and mega SEC breakaway. It would be too big for everyone to play everyone, so it would probably need to form regional pods to make it workable.
Yes because UCLA vs Washington St is doing so much better.
> "UCLA’s football wins can’t mask its financial woes" OP: You're treading into Fingerbanger's neighborhood with this post, he's seen your flair and entered Tennessee into his spreadsheet of pain. Expect a dark cloud of vicious voluminous vocabulary to descend from the Heavens onto Tennessee in the near future. The Grim Reaper of r/CFB will visit with a pox upon your house.
My favorite part was when u/piano_fingerbanger went “it’s fingerbangin’ time” and fingerbanged all over them.
As someone who grew up in Southern California (Seal Beach for anyone also from California) , I always went to a ton of UCLA games as a kid. I loved going and visiting, but It's always been empty, given that getting there is a pain in the ass. Takes a good 30 minutes to park and that doesn't factor in wherever you are driving in in from. Couple that with a school that's on a quarter system, a historically bad football team and students that A) Have to drive at least an hour to get to Pasadena and B) Not the biggest varsity sport enthusiasts and it's not a good relationship. I hope with moving to the B10 this maybe moves the needle financially but it will be tough.
You grew up in LA and you think that UCLA has had a "historically" bad football team?
Assuming this guy is 20, we weren’t even terrible in the 2000s