Why college football fans stay home

College football remains a popular game on television, but in-person attendance at games is dropping. Some of the sport's leaders have expressed surprise at this, but if you've been to a college football games in recent years, you'll know why so many seats are empty: Fans at college football games are not treated very well.

College football fans pay a lot to attend a game, then are screened like criminals at the entrance gates and are treated as a mere afterthought in a TV-centered event. 

Even I,  a college football fan who has attended hundreds of games across the country over the years, am questioning whether to keep going.

Empty stands at this year's game between San Diego 
State and Towson State

Here are the problems:

The Price of Admission: Earlier this year I spent $61 per seat for three tickets to the UCLA-Arizona game in Tucson. No, wait a minute, there was a mysterious extra $2 "fee" on each ticket, so it was $63. No, wait a minute, there was another $1 per ticket "delivery cost" (even though these were electronic tickets). So a total of $192 for three seats on a metal bench in the upper deck with no back or arm rests. If we wanted to sit closer to the field, the price would have been over $140 per seat.

And this wasn't even a big game: Coming in, Arizona was on a 16-game losing streak.

By comparison, a $12 ticket to the local movie theater gives you a wide reclining seat with a footrest.

It's common to pay over $100 per seat for many college football games. But that's not all. A friend of mine said he had to make a $5,000 donation to San Diego State just for privilege of buying season football tickets.

And don't forget the $10 to $40 you'll spend for parking.

Or, you could stay at home and watch the game on TV for no more than the monthly price of your satellite or cable fee, which gives you access to scores of games.

When does the game start? If you bought tickets to see "Hamilton" even six months from now, you would know whether it was an 8 p.m. show or a 2 p.m. matinee and that would not change. But college football fans are kept in the dark, with the kickoff time not announced until a week or two ahead of time. It could be an afternoon game, it could be a night game, it could even start at 9 a.m. (as the Boise State-San Diego State game did this year). 

Sure, you might need to plan your life, but TV dictates when the game starts and they'll tell you when they're good and ready.

Entering the stadium: You'd think that fans paying the high ticket prices of college football would be warmly welcomed at the gate, but instead they're greeted by grim security personnel doing intrusive searches, X-ray scanners and a long list of items they can't bring in. Depending on the stadium, you might be barred from bringing in food, fanny packs, even diaper bags.

Commercial timeouts: This is probably the biggest complaint among in-person college football fans. Imagine if you went to "Hamilton" and every seven or eight minutes, the show just stopped, all the performers milled about on the stage for three minutes, and then they show restarted. And this happened about 20 times during the show. Would you continue to go to the theater if every show was like this?

This is pretty much what football fans have to deal with because of the pervasive TV commercial breaks throughout the game. Everything stops and nothing happens — over and over and over. These stoppages can easily add an hour to each game. 

Sure, if you're watching at home on TV, you have to deal with the commercial breaks, too. But you can surf channels, do other things around the house, or simply record the game so you can skip through all the breaks.

Hungry? As I mentioned, some venues make it difficult to bring your own sandwich and chips to the game. Before considering going to the concession stand, you might want to consider taking out a loan. As just an example. a regular bottle of water at San Diego State games in 2021 cost $7, while a personal pizza was $10 and a beer $14.

I've also noticed that some stadiums are going "cashless" for all purchases. Personally, this doesn't bother me much, but for some people it might. It's another example of how the venue is doing what's convenient for it, not for the fans.

Replays:  Watching on TV, you get multiple replays of key moments, plus an endless parade of key stats. But at stadiums, they seem to offer this kind of thing grudgingly: A handful of replays here, a smattering of basic stats there. On TV, they'll note if the quarterback has completed 12 passes in a row, or if one team has failed to convert on five straight third downs, but this kind of proactive, fan-friendly information is rare in the stadium

Can you understand the public address announcer?  Usually you can't. Is it that hard to have a good P.A. system? 

Book review: "So Happiness to Meet You" by Karin Esterhammer

Many an American, perhaps unhappy with life in the U.S., or just bored, has pondered what it would be like to leave the country and start anew elsewhere.  Would it be exciting? Liberating? Strange? 

For most Americans this is just a passing daydream, but Karin Esterhammer actually did it. In 2008, she and her husband Robin, plus their 8-year-old son, abruptly left their Los Angeles home and moved to Vietnam.

In her enjoyable book "So Happiness to Meet You," Esterhammer describes the difficulties, surprises and comical moments that followed.   

Esterhammer had just been laid off from her job and her husband's small business was sputtering, so they decided that a year in low-cost Vietnam, with Robin paid to teach English, could help them right their floundering financial ship. It didn't work out quite that smoothly — for a while, they wondered if they would ever be able to return to the U.S. — but their shaky financial state makes this a better book.

Rather than sheltering away in a high-end neighborhood surrounded other ex-patriates and waited on by servants, Esterhammer and her family take up residence in a "regular" Vietnamese neighborhood. They soon find they must padlock their door to keep neighbors from wandering into their house and snooping around. They learn to deal with frequent power outages and floods, and the sounds of karaoke being sung at all times of the day and night.

But there are plusses too. Esterhammer comes to form close bonds with her neighbors, gets to plenty of practice speaking Vietnamese, and learns to cook local foods.

Looking around at her neighborhood, she also gains an appreciation for enjoying life with little money.

"The Vietnamese are philosophical about struggle: Don't look back, tomorrow will be better," she notes.

I loved how open Esterhammer is in telling the story, even when it comes to her family's personal lives. She describes getting breast implants removed in a Vietnamese hospital, and her shock when the woman she is sharing a recovery room with crawls into bed with her. 

When Robin loses most of his teaching jobs, she observes some of his classes and soon discovers why: He is a terrible teacher.

"The lessons were not just sleep-inducing, but PhD-dissertation-on-potting-soil sleep-inducing."

She knocks her husband for sleeping long hours and not being much help around the house.  I was kind of expecting the book to end with a divorce (spoiler alert: It does not).

Esterhammer's encounters with a group of ex-patriate wives in a group she dubs the "Ladies who Lunch Because They're Bored" are painfully comical. (Said one of the wives: "I have no interest in learning about Vietnamese culture.")

Esterhammer's family returned to California two and a half years after they arrived, but she came away with a  love for her adopted homeland.

"If you ever get the chance to become stranded in a foreign country with no money to get home, I recommend Vietnam."