Home field advantage

Column by Nick Prete, ASU News

What is home field advantage? It’s when Sun Devil Stadium is packed to the brim with every last seat in the house filled. Home field advantage is what it will take to help the Sun Devils past the Ducks when they come to OUR house, and try to take down OUR team. 

The graph here covers the past five Sun Devil Football season’s home game attendance, as well as the attendance of this season’s home games. It shows that while it has had some peaks, we’ve been suffering at attendance since the 07 and 08 seasons. In 2008, our game vs. NAU brought over 60,000 people into the stadium. However, this year vs. NAU didn’t even bring in 50,000 even though we had around 6,000 more students enrolled here.

The size of our student body is a factor of attendance because the more students we have here, the more students should be there cheering on the Devils! Plus there are always our faithful alumni coming to the games, and other general fans, or opposing team fans.

With that in mind, the past few years have been struggling to get a decent average attendance. By decent, I mean 60,000 or higher. This may seem a bit high, but considering our student population and alumni base, this should be no problem.

Especially for the Oregon game however, we need to crack the 75,000 barrier. Our current attendance record for a home football game was 74,963 when ASU played California on November 9th, 1996. Not surprisingly, with a crowd making Frank Kush stadium full of Sun Devil Spirit, ASU was victorious over Cal, 35 to 7.

So let’s all be the 12th man (or woman) and do everything we can to help the team win this Thursday.

Help Blackout the Duck.

Go Devils!