STANFORD FOOTBALL
Plenty of empty seats for best show in town

(12-11) 19:41 PST -- It's one of the biggest mysteries in Bay Area sports: Why can't Stanford draw more people to its home football games?

If you put out a great product, people will buy it, right? Well, in this case, no, they haven't. Despite excellent teams the past two years, the attendance numbers have stayed flat.

Some season-ticket holders pin part of the blame on the movable kickoff times to accommodate TV, saying they wreak havoc on family schedules. Others say there just aren't enough Stanford grads in the area. Others point to the wide variety of leisure and entertainment alternatives that people enjoy here.

A couple of veteran sports marketing consultants contend the school simply has not committed nearly enough resources to its marketing and ticket sales force.

The Cardinal drew an average of 40,139 people to fan-friendly, 50,000-seat Stanford Stadium with walk-up tickets available for $12, even though the 11-1 team is headed to the Orange Bowl with superstar quarterback Andrew Luck, one of the nation's most prolific offenses and charismatic coach Jim Harbaugh.

That's an average of 2,000 fewer people than they drew last year with Heisman Trophy runner-up Toby Gerhart and nearly 2,000 fewer than they drew in 2006 when they went 1-11 in the first year at the new stadium.

They have sold out the stadium just five times in those five years. This year only the USC game was a sellout. In the fifth-largest market area in the country, Stanford sold 18,000 season tickets, a number that hasn't grown appreciably in recent years.

For the Arizona game, featuring two Top 25 teams, the paid attendance was just 38,000, and the actual crowd was closer to 30,000. Stanford doesn't issue a count of no-shows, but, except for the USC game, the number of unused tickets seemed to range from 5,000 to 10,000 this season.

Even more embarrassing was last year's game with Oregon, which came in as the seventh-ranked team in the country only to be upset by the Cardinal 51-42 in a thriller. That game didn't sell out either.

Stanford players have expressed disappointment that the stands weren't full. After repeatedly saying that it would take time to build attendance, Harbaugh acknowledged after the final home game that he was disappointed too.

As he put it, "Our players have done something remarkable, and that's something that's caught the attention of the world."

Tickets for $12

Maybe so, but they haven't won over much of the local ticket-buying public despite warm weather, excellent sight lines at the stadium and affordable tickets. Tickets started at $12 for adults and $8 for children. A parking fee of $15 for non-season-ticket holders was instituted this year, but few people have complained about it.

Some late arrivers, however, have complained about the distances they had to walk to the stadium. But that was also the case when more than 50,000 regularly attended games in the old stadium, which was nowhere near as comfortable as this one. On the other hand, relatively few games were on TV.

A more frequent criticism is over the starting times of games. The times are set by the Pac-10's TV partners, and because of Stanford's success, games tended to start later. This year's games kicked off at 3:30, 8:15, 5, 2, 5 and 4:30. The times often are not set until either six or 12 days before the game, complicating family plans and group excursions.

"Everybody understands TV helps exposure, recruiting, the bottom line," said David Vargas, who became Stanford's director of football marketing last summer. "But it makes it tough to plan. It shoots a hole in group sales opportunities."

Other college football programs face variable starting times, but Stanford is trying to make up for years of losses, a problem compounded by a poor economy.

"We have not had a history of winning football," Vargas said. "Only in the last couple of years have we had winning records" since 2001.