Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/399784
I t looks as though James Franklin is fi- nally going to get to see what #107kStrong really looks like. Penn State announced earlier this month that the Ohio State game is a sell- out. It's the first of the season for the Nittany Lions, and while Franklin had called on the state's football fans to pack Beaver Stadium for every home game, not just the big ones against highly ranked, much-despised rivals, overall home attendance has hardly been a dis- appointment. In their first three home games, the Lions drew 299,419 fans. That works out to 99,806 fans per game, an im- provement of 7,110 per game from last season. If the upswing continues in their re- maining home games against Maryland, Temple and Michigan State, the Lions will have reversed a trend that began six years ago. Since peaking at 108,917 fans per game in 2007, the team's average home attendance has declined every year, from 108,254 in 2008 to a low of 96,730 in 2013. A lot of factors appear to have played into the attendance decline, from the clumsy rollout of the Seat Transfer & Equity Plan, to the program's fall from national title contention in the waning years of the Paterno era, to the Sandusky scandal and the NCAA sanctions that followed. It was harder for fans to get excited when they knew going into the season that the Lions had no shot at Big Ten or national titles. Given all that, the news that Penn State's attendance is ticking back up is significant. Some of the headwinds have of course abated, notably the NCAA sanctions. But it's also easy to read the numbers as byproducts of James Franklin's relentless promotional ef- forts, which include the #107kStrong Twitter onslaught. The man is nothing if not persistent. And he's had to be, because Penn State has a lot of stadium to fill. Maybe more than it needs. The last major rebuilding project, completed in 2001, raised Beaver Stadi- um's capacity to 107,282 (it was subse- quently reduced to 106,572 to comply Attendance gains give program a boost N E W S & N O T E S