Dan Mullen’s assertion that Gators fans aren’t supporting the program misses the mark

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All summer, I felt like there was an undercurrent running through many of Dan Mullen’s speeches to Gators fans. A direct quote in a recent SEC Country story attributed as a go-to line for Mullen during that speaking tour brought that undercurrent clearly to the surface:

What comes first? The team wins and the fans follow? Or the fans give the support and the team feeds off it? It doesn’t happen without the fans being there first.

The implication is clear. Mullen doesn’t believe that the fans have been pulling their weight supporting the team, and he expects that to change regardless of the product on the field.

Except that’s not the way businesses work. Successful businesses thrive when providing a quality product that is worth a customer’s time and money. And make no mistake, Gators football – despite not paying its main labor force – is in the entertainment business.

So have Gators fans supported the program with their time and money? And has the administration supported those fans by reinvesting into the football program?

Have Gators fans supported the program?

I’m so thankful for everyone who reads my work on this site, but I’m under no illusion that I’m the only place for you to get analysis. If I stop providing content that is differentiated, you will stop reading. And I strongly believe that if the quality goes down, you should go elsewhere.

And since we’re talking about quality, since 2010 Florida football has finished unranked in the AP Poll five times and 9th, 14th and 25th the other three years. There have been two losing seasons, an embarrassing credit card scandal and an even more embarrassing loss to Georgia Southern. Two coaches have been fired because they couldn’t right the ship, at least not to the standards of a program that reached national championship heights in 1996, 2006 and 2008.

It’s not a coincidence that attendance has waned since the hiring of Will Muschamp. The quality of the product has decreased considerably (11.4 wins per year from 2005-2009 to 7.5 wins per year from 2010-2017). But that attendance drop actually shows a pretty significant loyalty of the fans compared to other programs.

Typically after a good season, a team will see a bump in attendance. In the seasons  after Florida’s most recent National Championships (2007 and 2009), the Gators averaged attendance of 90,388 and 90,635, respectively. In 2017, following a long drought of winning and the McElwain death threat-related firing, Florida averaged 86,715 fans, a drop of 4.1 percent from the post-championship heights.

In 2014, the year after Jameis Winston led Florida State to a National Championship, FSU averaged attendance of 82,211. The Seminoles – after finishing 2016 ranked 8th in the country – struggled to a 7-6 record and the average attendance dropped to 70,943, a drop of 13.7 percent compared to 2014. Even that highly ranked 2016 team averaged just 76,800 fans, a drop of 6.6 percent.

Indeed, in McElwain’s first season in 2015, the Gators averaged 90,065 fans per game. What this indicates is that there are maybe 3000-4000 fans who will stay away when the product is poor, but that most Gators fans live out the “all kinds of weather” mantra.

I’m not even sure attendance is the best way to measure fan engagement anyway. A better metric to measure engagement with the program is how we usually measure most other businesses: money.

From 2005-2016, Florida ranks fifth in athletic revenue in all of college sports. The Gators have never ranked below 8th nationally. Compare that to Florida State, where the ‘Noles have ranked 15th in revenue over the same time-frame and have fallen as low as 20th nationally. Since the vast majority of athletic revenue comes from football, this reflects support of the football team.

And it isn’t like the majority of Florida’s revenue has come during the national championship years.

The chart above shows total revenue by year from 2005-2016 for the top-10 revenue-producing programs. Florida is highlighted in red, and the Gators are right in the middle of the pack and increase at approximately the same rate as every other top-10 program. Not only is the revenue increasing, but it’s a linear increase. This indicates that the increase isn’t a function of success or failure, but just blind support.

It’s pretty clear. The fans have continued supporting the program financially, even if attendance is slightly down. The Gators have brought in almost $1.4 billion in revenue since 2005. That’s $344 million more than the rivals in Tallahassee.

Has the Florida program valued its fans?

I think it’s accurate to say that Gators fans have supported the program and the team. In fact, there has been tremendous loyalty to a program that – quite honestly – hasn’t done a very good job of honoring that loyalty.

While Florida does rank sixth in total spending on athletics from 2005-2016, the Gators have been pretty stingy on a percentage basis compared to its peers. The chart below shows the revenue, expenses, profit and profit to revenue ratio of the top-20 revenue-producing athletic departments from 2005-2016.

Total revenue, expenses, profit and profit to revenue ratio for the top-20 revenue-producing college football programs from 2005-2016. (Will Miles/Read and Reaction)

The column I want to draw your attention to is on the right hand side. The ratio of profit to revenue measures how much of the money that comes in is pocketed by the university versus being spent on athletics.

The Gators program has a profit to revenue ratio of 10.9 percent, well above the average of the top-20 revenue-producing programs (7.2%) and significantly higher than Florida State (4.0%), Tennessee (3.5%), Auburn (5.2%) and Ohio State (6.7%). While Alabama and Texas A&M have spent less of its money as a percentage than the Gators, both of those programs have state-of-the-art facilities and bring in more total dollars.

So while Florida has outpaced Florida State by $344 million on the revenue side, the Gators have only outspent the Seminoles by $236 million. For an extra $236 million over a 12-year period, shouldn’t Florida be lapping Florida State when it comes to facilities?

Yet all we hear about is how the program is behind and needs to play catch-up when it comes to football facilities. This clearly indicates that either the administration is spending inefficiently, has decided to spend significantly more money on non-football sports or has decided to pocket money that has come in from football rather than spend it on facilities upgrades.

Indeed, it appears to be the first reason. While the numbers are relatively scattered, I was able to find spending numbers specific to football for the 2013 and 2017 seasons. Florida spent $23.0 million in 2013 and $32.1 million in 2017 on football-related expenses. That’s a lot of money.

But Florida State spent $22.1 million in 2013 and $42.5 million in 2017. The Seminoles are outspending the Gators when it comes to football despite bringing in an average of $28.7 million less annually into the athletic program from 2005-2016.

There are likely very good reasons that Florida has decided to cap its football spending even with its massive revenue advantage. There are certainly Title IX considerations, major facilities upgrade initiatives have been announced and I don’t fundamentally believe it is a good idea to have massive debt service payments. There are people smarter than I  setting the administration’s priorities, and I’m fine if that’s how they have decided to set them.

But with all that said, it is then disingenuous to send out the head coach to say the fans should provide more support to the team without at least pointing out that the program has been taking the fans’ money and not allocating it towards that very same team. And that’s especially true when all available evidence suggests that those fans have been supporting the team at a really high level even through the struggles.

Indeed, if we look at ticket revenue (driven primarily by football) compared to attendance, we see that the revenue has continued to increase even though there has been a drop in attendance.

There’s only one way to accomplish that particular feat: raise ticket prices. So while the program has won considerably less, scored way less and spent conservatively, it has continued to place more value on the privilege to attend the game.

That initially appears to be smart business when demand is so strong that you can raise prices even as the quality of the product goes down. But the fact that prices can be raised even with reduced quality means that the customer feels disenfranchised but has no way to combat it. Except to be more vocal.

And that is where I think the “lack of fan support” claim originates.

Let’s go back to the example of this site. Since it is free, you can agree or disagree with me and voice your opinion, but you haven’t given me anything except your time. However, if I start charging per article, you’re going to get upset if the length of what I write decreases by half.

You may still subscribe and pay my fee, but I guarantee you that my email box will fill up with people who want to tell me they liked it before when the quality was higher and it only cost them time. I hear it every day on Twitter as people compare Read and Reaction to other Gators sites out there that charge for information. The expectation is that the information behind a paywall is superior because it is more expensive.

That’s essentially what the Gators have done recently. The program has won 35 percent less often since 2010 compared to 2005-2009 and certainly has won less than in the Spurrier years. Yet, prices keep going up.

I don’t blame the fans for being vocal. I blame the administration. They are the ones who have created the conditions that have caused the frustration, not by losing on the field, but by simultaneously increasing profits while losing more ($3.9 million in 2005 compared to $20.1 million in 2016).

Takeaway

And perhaps that’s why I bristle when Mullen gets up in front of the fans and says they need to do a better job supporting the program. It offends me because all objective measures say that the fans are doing an excellent job of supporting the program compared to their peers.

It offends me because the program is one of the most profitable in the country, yet does not spend like more successful programs. As much as McElwain’s tactic of pushing for upgraded facilities in public was a bad look, after taking a closer look at the numbers, he wasn’t actually wrong. He just used a terrible approach that alienated people who could have been his allies.

It offends me because every year I plan a trip with my father and brother to catch a game. It’s quite an undertaking since everyone’s work schedules never align and I live almost 1,000 miles away from Gainesville. It costs money and vacation time, and has become even more difficult recently because we have to hope if we pick a game late in the season that it isn’t meaningless by the time we get there (see, 2013 versus FSU).

But I was there against FSU for Tim Tebow’s last game as the light bulbs were flashing throughout the entire fourth quarter. I was there against LSU in 2006 for the jump pass to Tate Casey. I was there for John Brantley’s deep throw to Andre Debose to open the game against Alabama in 2011. I was there last year for Feleipe Franks throw to Tyrie Cleveland. And I’ll be there next season too, regardless of what is said or how good the team is.

And that is something that Mullen needs to be told about the fans. We’ve been there the whole time. Attendance is down, but not nearly as much as it should be based on comparison to other programs. Fans are vocal because they are passionate but can’t stay away, even if the product is terrible. The numbers objectively say that the fans are bringing their support, every year.

In fact, the numbers say that we’ve been doing a better job of that than the administration.

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Revenue and Expense data mostly collated from USA Today