PSU has 20K student section all...

[Bobcat99]

Sorry, Rice and Vanderbilt also play 1/2 games a season in Reliant and Adelphia, respectively. Again, their attendance is not the best, nor is their onfield product (though Vandy has been good this year; but, frankly, we do not even deserve to be discussed in the same sentence as those two schools, being as they are small elite private schools compared to our huge public commuter school).

[Guest]

There are no assigned seats at PSU football games.  It is first-come, first served.  Some students got in line 6 days before the game...

The S is made by t-shirts that are handed out about 15 minutes before the game started.  They do it in the Senior Section every game.

White shirts are handed out to border the S.  This is done every game.

However, the S is only made by less than 2000 students.  That means that less than 2000 t-shirts were handed out.  The rest of the students came in white on their own accord; we thought it would look cool and bada$$ at night under the lights.  From all of the feedback I'm reading on websites like this, it seems to have really worked.

Let's go USF.  I'd love to see you pound Pitt.

Well, I stand corrected then -- I wasn't really sure, just made an incorrect assumption.

And it sounds like this would be the way to make it happen at USF.  Get everyone to wear one color (Gold) then pass out the other color (Green) to the right seats/section after everyone is in their seats.

[Guest]

I'm not sure we'll ever have that many students come to a game, unless the university vastly changes its mission and evolves into less of a commuter school. Frankly, the priorities of the majority of our students aren't that in such that regardless of athletics success, they're not going to pay attention to USF sports. That's just the nature of the kind of students our university recruits. I've learned a lot about the USF student body in the short time I've been teaching here, and that's one of the big things I've noticed.

Heck, it would be a step in the right direction to recruit students who aren't actively OPPOSED to intercollegiate athletics.

If the administration is really that focused on getting us into the top tier, they need to:

a) build several thousands more dorm rooms

recruit students nationally

c) build an on-campus stadium (i know this is a conversation for another thread, but let's look at other D-1 schools that play in pro stadiums: Temple, Pitt (gets lousy student attendance), Minnesota (ditto; barely fills half of the Metrodome in total attendance), San Diego St. (AVERAGED 17,700 last year), and Tulane (barely broke 20k on average). Is playing in a pro stadium a recruiting advantage for Temple? Tulane? PITT!?

Until then, the best chance for student involvement is basketball. Look at UC; while they're far less a commuter school than we, they're about the same size, and urban. They get NOBODY at their football games. Of course, most of the crowd at their (obviously sellout) basketball games are non-students...

First, consider that Pennsylvania uses the 'flagship' system -- that means there is one major state school and the rest are smaller, regional ("commuter") schools.  Penn State gets a large segment of the PA HS graduates because of this.

Second, consider that Penn State gets a lot of students from New York State because the SUNY system has a lot of smaller campuses.  I know that out of 500 people in my graduating class in a Rochester suburb, more than 50 had Penn State as their first choice.

Hence, Penn State is a really big school with mostly traditional age students.  It has also been playing football for more than a century, so most of the home-grown Nittany Lions grew up watching PSU football.

In contrast, USF is usually a back-up choice for freshmen and actually gets more transfer students every year than first-time-in-college students.

The USF Alumni Assoication did a study of current students and their attitudes towards USF.  It was very interesting overall, but here is one result: 83% of the students at the Tampa campus either have attended or are interested in attending USF athletic events.  

There are 32,000 (guess-timate) students at the Tampa campus.  83% of 32,000 is more than 26,000.  So it is possible if USF starts winning that you could see 20,000 students at USF games.  Of course that would put some in the upper deck because there are only 10,000 student seats in the lower bowl... but the math works.