If you tune into Friday night’s Pac-12 championship football game between the University of Utah and the University of Oregon, you will observe powerful scenery during the ABC broadcast.

The Utes (11-1) are in the playoff chase. The Ducks (10-2) are pursuing a Rose Bowl berth. The game will decide more than a conference championship. But if the television network pulls back and gives its audience a wide shot of the stadium, what you’ll see are tens of thousands of empty seats at Levi’s Stadium.

The 68,500-seat venue is expected to be about half filled, as it was for last year’s title game. Tickets aren’t being sold for the highest levels of the stadium. And the vacant seats underscore a larger trend in college football.

Consider:

• The Big Ten Conference posted its lowest average attendance in 25 years (65,376) last season. And it’s forecast to break that record-low again this season.

• The Pac-12 suffered the biggest attendance decline in the upper echelon of major college football in 2018, drawing nearly 250,000 fewer fans to its stadiums than it did just one year earlier.

• Even the football-crazy SEC was down more than 100,000 in total attendance in that same period. It marked the third straight season of declining attendance for the conference that markets itself with the slogan, “It Just Means More."

Utah athletic director Mark Harlan will be in Santa Clara, Calif. on Friday. His fifth-ranked team is flirting with its first-ever College Football Playoff berth. But Harlan has been in contact with fellow Pac-12 athletic directors and some peers in the SEC.

Said Harlan, earlier this season: “They’re just stunned with what’s going on out there. You’re seeing massive drops in attendance in places where you never thought you’d see it.

“We know it’s a real issue.”

Conference

attendance

Teams

Games 2018

attendance

Avg. Change

in avg. Southeastern Conference 14 101 7,473,374 73,994 -1,080 Big Ten 14 97 6,341,435 65,376 -851 Big 12 10 67 3,818,091 56,986 134 Atlantic Coast 14 91 4,442,603 48,820 378 Pac-12 12 78 3,622,480 46,442 -3,159

The Pac-12 Conference championship game will move to Las Vegas in 2020. The hope is that the allure of The Strip and a new NFL stadium will help sell tickets. But drawing fans back to regular-season college games is now a high-priority for Power Five Conference leaders.

Utah and Colorado joined the Pac-12 Conference in 2011. A year later, the conference drew a record 4.2 million fans to its home stadiums. An expanded SEC established its all-time attendance record that same season, selling 7.5 million tickets – the largest conference attendance total in college football history.

Since then, though, attendance numbers have been on a steady decline.

Late kickoffs have been blamed. Rising ticket prices, too. Also, increasingly demanding family activities, a saturation of available entertainment, and the living-room television set are all used to explain the trend. But Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens and SEC commissioner Greg Sankey both said they believe we’re amid a societal shift.

“I think we have a changing consumer,” Mullens said. “Getting folks to commit to seven college football Saturdays with a season ticket is hard.”

Sankey believes the issue reaches beyond college football. He’s studied professional sports leagues in America and abroad and knows they’re all struggling to attract fans to the stadiums.

When asked why it was becoming harder to sell tickets to college football games Sankey offered, “A sociologist may be a better contributor than me.”

♦♦♦

USC professor David M. Carter is not a sociologist. He’s an authority on sports business and strategic marketing. And he’s written four books on the subjects.

Said Carter: “Media dollars were once the tail that wags the dog. Now, they’re the dog.”

ESPN Events, a division of ESPN, owns and operates 14 college football bowl games, for example. The event company was formed to provide inventory for the television network. ESPN/ABC will televise 35 of the 40 bowl games this season, including the national championship game.

Carter referred to all college football games -- bowl games and regular season -- as, “commodities.” They’re obtained as inventory and used by the networks to generate advertising income. It helps explains why ESPN and Fox signed a $3 billion agreement with the Pac-12 in 2011. That contract spans a dozen seasons and at the time was the most lucrative contract in college football. But it also gave the conference’s television partners control of kickoff times.

Pac-12 fans trying to plan to attend games are now in an uncomfortable position. Kickoffs for select conference games are sometimes not announced until Sunday, as little as six days before the event.

Conference commissioner Larry Scott has on multiple occasions called the lack of conference control a “tradeoff" given up in the negotiation in exchange for more revenue. Regardless, it’s fostered growing frustration with conference members and fans. Also, revenue generated by that initial contract was eclipsed by more lucrative media-rights contracts negotiated by Power Five Conference peers.

Said Carter: “I find it interesting, if not ironic, that the very same conference that bent over backwards to accommodate those television partners now complains about late kickoff times.”

Don’t expect the bellyaching to stop anytime soon. The Pac-12 media contract isn’t up until 2024. Before this season at Pac-12 Media Day, commissioner Scott floated the notion of shifting some of the broadcast windows next year to 9 a.m. kickoffs.

It was a ‘Hail Mary’ pass that landed with a thud with some.

Oregon AD Rob Mullens consulted with Ducks season-ticket holders and members of the UO football program. Fans had little interest in a breakfast-time kickoff. And football players and coaches didn’t welcome the idea of waking at three o’clock in the morning to begin pre-game preparations.

“At this point,” Mullens said, “it would only be an opt-in and we’re not an opt-in.”

The Pac-12′s footprint in the Pacific Time Zone might help explain why it has the steepest decline in attendance. The TV networks desire live college football programming, wall to wall. The Pac-12 is the only Power Five Conference routinely available to play in the latest available time slots and that’s where its games have been regularly placed.

Last month, while knee-deep in the College Football Playoff race, Oregon was assigned a 7:30 p.m. kickoff at home against Arizona. That announcement sparked the public ire of Mullens and drew loud criticism from fed up UO fans, some of whom vowed not to renew their season tickets.

It also meant that the then-No. 6 ranked Ducks would be left playing on the Pac-12 Network, which only reaches 17.9 million households. That’s an audience less than a third of the SEC Network and Big Ten Network. By comparison, ESPN reaches more than 86 million homes.

Oregon isn’t alone. Three times this season Utah has kicked off a game at 8 p.m. local time.

Utes AD Mark Harlan said: “I could give you the company line and say that we’ve just got to roll with it, it’s the contract, we gotta do it. And that would be true. But on the same token we have to be really thoughtful when it comes up again because there’s no question it’s caused a lot of damage.”

UCLA’s home attendance this season (43,848) is the lowest at the Rose Bowl since it moved to the venue in 1982. A chunk of that can be attributed to a disappointing 4-8 performance on the field by Chip Kelly’s Bruins, but Pac-12 insiders believe late kickoffs have hurt attendance in Pasadena and everywhere across the conference.

“The competition of a widescreen TV at home is real,” said Washington State athletic director Pat Chun.

The core of Washington State’s fan base commutes to Pullman, Wash. from more than 100 miles away on game days. The same can be said of the core group of Oregon and Oregon State fans. Chun said every empty seat is a lost opportunity to capture revenue.

“It’s a critical source of funding for most athletic departments, especially at Power Five schools and the Pac-12,” said Chun.

“When you look at revenue lines we control, that we can impact, it’s Fundraising No. 1, Ticket Sales No. 2, and Corporate Sponsorships No. 3.”

Those key streams of revenue are often tied together. Late in the 2018 season, for example, WSU was assigned a 7:30 p.m. kickoff for a home game against Arizona. Donors, sponsors and the fan base collectively groaned. Chun did his best to manage a situation he had no control over.

“There was a level of administrative disappointment just for the fact that we were on a roll at that time and especially because in Pullman if we could have had an afternoon kickoff, it would have impacted our attendance,” Chun said.

At the end of the 2018 regular season, Utah prepared for a nonconference home game on Nov. 24 against in-state rival BYU. Despite forecasts of a snowstorm, FS1 took control of the broadcast and set the kickoff in Salt Lake City for 8 p.m. And this season’s BYU-Utah game was snapped up by ESPN. That game kicked off at 8:20 p.m.

“There’s nothing in the contract that can stop that,” the Utah AD, Harlan, said. “It’s tough, you can’t have a 10-year-old out at 10:30 p.m. at night in a snowstorm.”

Six days after the BYU-Utah snowstorm game, the South Division champion Utes had to turn around and play North Division champion Washington for the Pac-12 title. Utah lost the game 10-3. It came in front of a dismal crowd at Levi’s Stadium, one that had to battle Bay Area rush-hour traffic on a Friday night to get there.

That championship-game event, like the regular-season Pac-12 games, wasn’t designed with die-hard Utah and Washington fans in mind. Fans weren’t even a consideration. The game was a piece of inventory created to crown a champion and generate maximum revenue for its TV partner.

“We have to remember this when the new deal comes up,” Harlan said. “Are we going to continue to do this or take less money?”

♦♦♦

Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes and his staff began the mission to retain existing season-ticket holders just hours after the Beavers lost to Oregon in the Civil War.

The OSU marketing department had already formulated a season-ticket renewal campaign and launched it just 72 hours after the season ended, blasting customers with a renewal offer on Tuesday.

The hope was to seize momentum from coach Jonathan Smith’s encouraging (5-7) record in his second season. Smith was already on the road recruiting new talent, but it was customer retention that OSU’s administration focused its energy on.

Insiders in Corvallis say the early returns are encouraging, but Oregon State is essentially starting the season-ticket build from the bottom floor. It sold fewer than 14,000 season tickets this season, down 15 percent from Smith’s first season. By comparison, the Mike Riley-coached OSU team in 2010 boasted a school-record 26,952 season tickets.

“The product on the field matters,” Barnes said. “But every Power Five Conference saw a decline in attendance in 2018 except for the ACC, which was flat. For all of us, nationally, we’ve got to think about what Gen Z and what Millennials want. We’ve got to figure out how to skate to where the puck is going on this issue.”

David M. Carter, the USC marketing professor, agrees that there’s a fractured consumer base. It’s composed of more seasoned football fans with disposable income vs. younger fans who will require much more from the experience to become engaged.

“It’s time vs. money vs. the experience,” Carter said. “You have a younger generation that is about experiential activities and an older demographic that has to figure out if they can go to the game and take all day to do that.”

It’s what the SEC commissioner Greg Sankey was talking about when he wondered whether a sociologist would have better answers. And it’s what Oregon AD Rob Mullens said his staff is thinking about as they push annually to try and keep Autzen Stadium near capacity.

“What I’ve seen with my own kids is that people are drawn to bigger events,” Mullens said. “It’s not just, ‘I’m loyal and I’m going to go support my team no matter the level of opponent,’ but ‘I’m going to go there because there’s going to be a lot of people, a lot of attention and I’m going to Tweet about it.’”

Mullens said it’s part of the reason why the Ducks agreed to play Auburn at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, to open the 2019 season. The game came with an ESPN “College GameDay” appearance. It was a loud early-season event, with guaranteed exposure and impact. Oregon has also scheduled a home-and-home series with Ohio State in 2020 (Eugene) and 2021 (Columbus).

“We want to challenge ourselves and continue to foster our brand,” Mullens said.

Alabama, criticized for its soft non-conference schedule in 2019, has scheduled future games with USC, Texas, Wisconsin and Florida State. The aim is to give Alabama fans fresher and more competitive matchups and keep them buying tickets.

Carter, the sports-marketing guru, said if he were consulting with a university on how to bring fans back to the stadium, he’d tell them to look toward their own campuses for answers. He said a vibrant, energetic game-day experience is essential.

“They really do need to manufacture a reason for people to go to the game,” Carter said. “And it’s not just the student body, it’s the alumni and corporate clientele who are struggling to find the time to attend.”

For Oregon and Oregon State, which are both on the quarter system, there’s an additional complication. Two or three home games are typically played each season before students are even back in class on campus.

Carter said football games are a great opportunity for universities to reinforce their brands and entertain on campus. But he warned that while cultivating students as part of your core fan base is smart, it’s also a little misguided.

“You can build a strong, avid base but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll attend,” he said. “The way we’re consuming sports is clearly different than how our parents or grandparents did. Avid fans may not even need to go to games very often.”

The game-day experience has to be a knockout winner. From the football team’s on-field performance, to the tailgate, to the in-stadium experience, “there’s something to the game-day experience, and having friends and colleagues rallying together,” Carter said.

It’s become a cottage-industry for small businesses that offer to cater a private tailgate experience for fans. And it’s something the universities know they need to be more involved with or even outsource.

Arizona State installed covered parking spaces in some of its prime tailgate lots to protect fans against the blistering desert sun. Oregon State is offering season-ticket holders who renew early for next season a chance to win sideline passes to a 2020 football game or have its “Benny the Beaver” mascot visit their tailgate. And Utah is working on an $81 million expansion of Rice-Eccles Stadium that will take football capacity to 52,000.

But will those seats be filled?

“Every empty seat contributes to the bottom line of your department,” Utah AD Mark Harlan said. “We’re all trying different things. We know that people’s patience is not what it once used to be. You want to pull up and park. You want to be able to avoid lines. You want to be there at the time that you want to be there.”

Harlan said the mindset inside the athletic departments has shifted in recent years. The AD can’t afford to sit around and blame kickoff times, he has to focus on what he can control.

“Now, it’s introspective," Harlan said. "What are we doing on our campus to make it as great as we can? The coaches are going to do what they do and get the teams ready, but what are we doing? You’ve got to be creative and make it as easy as possible, but I’m concerned.

"The numbers are down.”

♦♦♦

The Pac-12 championship game will kick off at 5 p.m. on Friday. The forecast includes high winds and rain. Second-hand ticket retailers such as StubHub were still selling 200-level tickets to the game for less than $30 this week. Face value is $40.

Ticketmaster didn’t offer 300- or 400-level seats for the college football championship event. Most likely, the stadium’s upper levels will be empty. Levi’s Stadium will operate at a diminished capacity on Friday night, a far cry from the most attended event in that stadium’s history.

This was WrestleMania 31. And 76,976 fans showed up to see it in 2015. That’s 5,000 more than attended Super Bowl 50 in the same venue nine months later. The wrestling event also went down as the highest grossing WWE event in history, generating $12.6 million.

Rush-hour kickoff? On a Friday? Between two teams traveling from out of the area?

It’s a big ask, even for someone living across the street from Levi’s Stadium. But as the conference athletic directors and a marketing expert have demonstrated, the empty seats aren’t an isolated disappointment. They’re part of a troubling trend.

Maybe Oregon and Utah will put on a great show. Maybe it will go down as one of the most exciting football games of the season. And it’s going to lead at least one of the teams to a New Year’s Day bowl berth. But it’s also going to serve as a perfect example of what’s wrong with college football.

Millions may watch on television. Commercials will be sold. A conference champion will be crowned, but given the lack of atmosphere, whatever happens will hardly contribute to the fabric of a college football fan base. It’s unlikely to spark anyone to buy season tickets for next season.

That’s a problem for the sport, especially in the regular season, where it counts most.

College football is worried. The empty seats are difficult to miss. The major conferences are more beholden than ever to the revenue generated by the conference media-rights deals. But also, they’re watching wistfully as more and more marginalized fans — and their dollars — are staying home.

Average attendance among the 129 major college football teams last season was the lowest in more than two decades. It will likely drop again, for the eighth time in nine seasons, when final figures from this season are reported.

Leadership across college football is “stunned” at what’s going on out there.

It probably shouldn’t be.