Stephens: Party deck at CSU stadium can capture new audience

CSU will call the Mountain West’s nicest football stadium home in 2017, but it’s not the sandstone, metal and glass architecture, the giant video board or the fact the venue is on campus that will make it the gem of the Rockies.

What will truly make the The Fort, The Otter Box, University of Colorado Heath Stadium (errr, Poudre Valley Hospital Stadium?) or whatever the 36,000-seat facility is called change football culture in this town is its standing-room-only section, aptly dubbed the Pitkin Porch.

As the Coloradoan’s Kelly Lyell first reported Saturday, Colorado State University will install what equates to a party deck at the on-campus stadium.

Brilliant. This is how you capture the casual audience.

There are around 4,000 dedicated CSU football fans in Fort Collins who make their way to Hughes Stadium during six fall weekends, regardless of the conditions. They’re the local season-ticket holders and the core of the Rams’ fan base. Then there are 150,000 remaining residents of this city who don’t.

Maybe they can’t afford season tickets starting at $140 per seat. Maybe they’re not fans of college football. Maybe they’d rather only pay to watch CSU play Minnesota and not Savannah State.

Or maybe they want to support the local university, but graduated elsewhere and prefer watching their Alma mater on Saturdays. If the 5,000-person Pitkin Porch is executed properly, those fans can do both.

GET A LOOK:Plans offer glimpse at CSU stadium's party deck

Fort Collins is a melting pot. A White Anglo-Saxon Protestant melting pot, but a melting pot nonetheless. People move here from across the country, eager to fork over the ridiculous cost-of-living expenses in order to call the Choice City home.

Sports fans inhabit this town, but plenty of them don’t have ties to CSU outside of sharing an area code. Fort Collins’ population grew by 11,975 from 2010 to 2014 and that’s not due to millennials popping out a second generation of baby boomers. They’re non-natives, or as locals hate — “transplants.”

They attended college at Nebraska, Texas A&M and UCLA. They’d love to come see the Rams in action, but not when it conflicts with watching the Bruins host Southern California on ABC.

Well why not watch your Alma mater play on TV while CSU is wrapping up a spot in the Mountain West championship game 30 yards away?

WHAT'S IN A NAME:New CSU stadium likely to carry corporate name

Hanging from the covered bar at the Pitkin Porch, according to current concept art, are multiple big-screen TVs. We could assume these will air the CSU game, or we could consider the bigger picture. The fans who buy tickets in this zone aren’t the diehards, they’re more casual and less interested in catching every play, similar to those who watch a game from The Rooftop at Coors Field. If CSU is what these patrons are interested in, they’ll hang over the rail and watch from the end zone with a perfect view of the video board on the opposite side of the stadium.

The rest want to watch their Huskers on TV and peek over at the live action during commercial breaks or whenever they hear the roar of the local crowd. Nebraska does play at Oregon the same day the on-campus stadium is scheduled to open in 2017.

Nothing about the CSU party deck is finalized and it’s hard to picture fire code allowing more than a couple hundred fans in the Pitkin Porch based on the renderings, but the concept is genius. Capture the local college football audience that otherwise wouldn’t attend a CSU game, then convert them.

For insight and analysis on athletics around Northern Colorado and the Mountain West, follow sports columnist Matt L. Stephens at twitter.com/mattstephens and facebook.com/stephensreporting.