Dave Brandon says students actually aren't showing up

Yeah, because students have so much extra money sitting around. I remember when I was a student it was so hard to find people to give interest free loans to.

This. I would only add that freshman not be the ones who are necessarily left out but rather we retroactively punish people who had shitty attendance by making them miss out on tickets, presuming we have things like that on record. If not, we should shart keeping track...

...and other sports are much easier to deal with for a student.  Football games are so long these days with all the TV timeouts and when you add in the tailgating, it ends up sucking away nearly an entire day.  Even the getting to the football stadium is more time consuming because of all the added traffic.

Lets get rid of classes for students at the university as well. Those are so outdated.

Do you have any evidence at all to support this post, or is it just your introduction to the self published thesis on the breakup of the moral fabric of college football?

As a student who is paying my for my own tuition, for my own rent, for my own groceries, and for my own tickets I have to frown upon your broad, sweeping generalizations. Some of aren't spoiled. Some of us appreciate our seats that we would otherwise have no way in hell of affording. Some of us still care about UM Football.

This post should be case study for the lack of basic logic and use of fallacious arguments aka the cable news effect. 

The student sections help separate college football from professional football. At my school, we take up about 1/6 of the stadium. Yes, there are empty seats. Yes, people don't always seem interested in the game. People show up late. A lot don't show up because they partied too hard the night before or just like tailgating. Still, the students as a collective group produce the majority of the energy found from the crowd, and it's not even close. 

Your generalization of this younger generation is extremely unfair. From the group I associate with, like 4 out of every 5 are paying their own way through school. That includes tuition, books, rent, groceries, and everything else. Not everybody likes football nowadays, but they also didn't back whenever the hell you were in college either. It's not because they're too good for it, they just have other interests.

There are empty seats everywhere, but there's still a ton of students, no matter what school, that truly love their school and football. "People who actually appreciate the seats"? Where are all of the allumni when it's 100+ degrees outside or 40 and pouring rain in the middle of a blowout?

That would drastically increase students reselling their tickets to make much-needed cash. A lot of buyers don't want to buy student tickets because of confusion about / desire to avoid the hassle of the validation process.

That would probably help too

I don't know how it works at UM, but we do general admission for the student section where I go. My buddies and I always get our group of tailgaters in the stadium at least 30 minutes early for every game. It works because I, like many others, wouldn't be in such a rush if I already knew exactly where I was sitting.

How would you do that exactly? I don't think it would be as easy as it seems.

$200/season is a very low price to pay to have the option to go to every home game, even if you don't use it.  Plus for the many (not all) students who aren't paying their own way, this is a rounding error to put on their parents tab next to tuition/rent and living expenses.

Hell we know that ND/MSU/OSU games can cost that much per game.  Why wouldn't you buy them?

I recently graduated and live in Chicago and I had my little sister who is still a student find a pair of kids who weren't going to buy them get them for me.  So I bought the whole season and will only make it to 3 games this year.  I don't bother with the hassle of reselling the others, because even without doing that it is still cheaper than stubhub-ing the big games that I want to go to.

Even when a student knows they only want to go to a big game or two, no one wants to be the person at the pregame: "hey everybody let's go" Reply: "I can't I didn't buy tickets this year".

(1) Make the face value equivalent to other sections (ex. annual seat donation charges/whatever)

(2) Eliminate validation charges

(3) Offer more single game tickets and set the face values TO THE MARKET (hint: not $65 UMASS & $75 MSU).

(4) I like the idea of losing priviledge to buy if you didn't attend 6 or 7 out of 8 the previous season

(5) General admission would help

There's not going to be a perfect solution. If the primary casulaties to a system based on tracking attendance and shrinking the student section are people who miss a semster abroad, I'd say those would fall squarely under the rubric of acceptable losses.

Also, carrots and sticks related to monetary punishment are only going to affect those students who are paying their own way and/or don't have extra money to burn. Students whose parents take care of everything anyway - and there's a damn sizeable percentage of them - aren't going to give a shit.

How would yelling at the diag the night before get people to go to the games?

When you consider that 42% of the freshman class is comprised of kids whose parents are paying that gigantic out-of-state tuition bill, you're guaranteed to have a large number of them from extremely comfortable homes who've never had to go without a single shiny new thing in their entire lives. UM has never been a low-cost institution relative to other schools, but I have to believe that the percentage of students who are from truly middle-income or working class financial backgrounds is lower than it's been for many decades. Back in the '70s a far lower percentage of students owned cars, and plenty of those were 10-year-old beaters. When I'm on campus these days for client meetings I'm amazed at the number of late-model BMWs, Mercedes, Range Rovers, and similarly upscale American models parked on campus side streets.