Another Excerpt from Endzone (BLL) ... this time chronicling the student seating policy

Submitted by M Gulo Gulo on

Here it is from the Michigan daily.

Link

Go Blue!

michchi85

August 31st, 2015 at 2:20 PM ^

Their research is further proof that Michigan should play noon games sparingly. Granted some of that is on the networks, but Harbaugh and a good football team means very few early games.

MichiganExile

August 31st, 2015 at 2:23 PM ^

If I were a cheapskate I would simply copy and paste all of these excerpts together and probably only be missing the foreword, table of contents, and an anecdote about Brandon hating puppies. 

HelloHeisman91

August 31st, 2015 at 2:31 PM ^

Another highlight of how clueless the department was. When measuring attendance they didn't consider game times and opponents to determine the effects of a policy change?

M-Dog

August 31st, 2015 at 4:30 PM ^

They may have . . . but then the numbers looked better when they didn't so they went with that.  I would not put it past them.  It happens all the time.
 
But it is LochDawwwg we are talking about here, so that may be assuming too much clever deceit.
 
Hanlon's razor:  "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
 

Blueblood2991

August 31st, 2015 at 2:37 PM ^

“As shaky as that was, the department’s system for tracking attendance in 2013 was even worse: They measured student attendance by the number of section cards they handed out to students, which the ushers handed to them when they walked into the stadium."

Kinda almost verifies that the 100,000+ attendance streak was fudged.

markusr2007

August 31st, 2015 at 2:59 PM ^

"Look, I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a jerk,” Proppe told me, “but Hunter and his group were not as sophisticated as we were about analyzing data. When I looked at this data for ten minutes on an Excel spreadsheet, I could figure out what the data really meant. I realized once we segment it out by start time, the attendance for both being on time and showing up overall, was worse under the general-admission policy than it had been in 2011 and 2012. When Hunter gave me the data so quickly, and urged me to share it with the public, I don’t think he realized that.

Superficial, hurry-up, feel-good marketing vs. quantitative statistical analysis and facts.

Gotta love it.

 

BlueMan80

August 31st, 2015 at 3:03 PM ^

for her senior season.  So long, good seats with friends on the 30 yard line.  She witnessed some of the fighting in the queues and being on the petite side, she gave up on trying to get down low in the corner to get on TV.  She even skipped a game which is something I was shocked to hear, because she is as fanatical about Michigan football as I am.  Another DB innovation that only pissed people off including alumni, not just the students.  Glad he's long gone.

steve sharik

August 31st, 2015 at 4:19 PM ^

GA, done well, works fine. They just botched the execution, big time.

The attraction of GA is that it rewards those who show up early; those who are first get to sit where they want, with whom they want. But the big problem that the athletic department didn't realize is that the size of the seats works with assigned seating b/c a person has to try and squeeze a grown-up, adult-sized ass into a seat size best used for an infant's high chair. So, when students come in a sit GA-style, they're going to take up more seats than there actually are, leaving some students without a seat.

After realizing this, their solution for the ND game was to give each student a ticket as he/she entered the stadium, locking the student into that seat. So, if you didn't arrive at the game next to your friends, you couldn't sit together. Furthermore, even if you did, you could be separated if you ended one row and your friend started another, putting you not only not next to each other, but at opposite ends of the section. This actually happened to me and a buddy of mine, and we had been looking forward to going to the game together and talking football during it.

And to those students who don't believe GA would work, let me ask you: how often did you sit in the seat printed on your ticket?

DK81

August 31st, 2015 at 5:54 PM ^

Just picked up my copy of ENDZONE at my local B&N in Grand Rapids. The lady working was nice enough to grab me a copy from the back and sell it to me because I asked nicely.

Lordfoul

August 31st, 2015 at 9:14 PM ^

“Department employees have told me the electronic scanning system can miss 5,000 to 10,000 tickets a game—or about 5 to 10 percent, a remarkably high margin of error,”

Saying you went to a Michigan Football game seems like a great alibi...