Iowa State athletics, fans could learn a lesson from Penn State

Jayadev Athreya

I spent the previous semester (Fall 1999) at Pennsylvania State University as part of a special mathematics program.

While I was on campus, I had the opportunity to attend two football games of one of the nation’s premier football programs.

Now, in general, Penn State is pretty similar to ISU. It is a large, land-grant institution (40,000 students) which is the dominant economic and social institution of the town it is located in.

However, sportswise, there are major differences: Penn State is a legendary football program led by a legendary coach. Iowa State is a notoriously unsuccessful program whose coach, while managing to improve the team somewhat, is still far from legendary status. Football fans, too, are very different.

While at Penn State, the fans fill up a stadium of close to 100,000 seats (which, by the way, they are expanding). At Iowa State we struggle to fill our 50,000 seat stadium.

And hey, when is the last time you saw signs all over campus requesting tickets for upcoming games (at prices up to $500)?

However, Iowa State can be proud of its basketball fans. Even with the troubling trend that we see at games like Texas A&M, we still put in close to 10,000 fans a game for men, where at Penn State they’re happy with 5,000.

And while the women’s attendance seems to be growing exponentially, Penn State, which also has a top-10 program, can’t claim crowds half as large as Iowa State’s.

Why the dichotomy? For a long time (32 years, to be precise) Joe Paterno has been head coach at Penn State University. Add his 18 years as an assistant to Rip Engel, and he has been at Penn State for 50 years.

His near-mythic personality has brought incredible amounts of money (his fund-raising built their library, which is named the Paterno Library), prestige and coverage to the football program but has left the rest of the athletic department as something of a stepchild.

The baseball field, for example, was recently left littered by a Penn State football event.

While this rankled the baseball players and coaches, they knew they really couldn’t do anything since without Paterno and the football program, they probably wouldn’t even have the field.

Iowa State also had a legendary figure in the coaching ranks —Johnny Orr, who is being honored at the end of this season.

While his effects probably are not as strong as Paterno’s, they were similar.

His personality and style of play changed ISU basketball into a house-packing winner, while ISU football slipped from embarrassment to embarrassment.

Now, with three young, successful (to different degrees, certainly) coaches, Iowa State has a chance to achieve the kind of balance which is rare in NCAA Division I schools.

Both men’s and women’s basketball are achieving huge success, and hopefully, the men’s attendance will increase now that they are ranked. Football has been slowly but steadily improving, and at least until this year, attendance has been increasing.

But there are some issues to be addressed if this promise is turned into consistency.

There was a sign at this weekend’s Kansas game which said it well: “Stand up, Old People!”

While it is fine to recognize alumni and contributors by giving them tickets to games, please put them in the parquet and allow students to occupy the arena circle.

This would truly make Hilton magical, like Cameron Indoor, or Maples Pavilion.

The other issue is the rising ticket prices.

While the ticket office seems to recognize the problem and is offering discount seats to many of the basketball games these days, one hopes that it is not too late for the decreasing crowds trend to change in men’s basketball and football.

But if these issues are taken care of, Iowa State has a chance to be one of truly rare creatures on the Division I map, a consistently successful in both attendance record in three sports.


Jayadev Athreya is a senior in math from Ames.