PITTSBURGH _ Among the Heinz Field fun facts enumerated on Page 10 of the annual Steelers media guide are the height and weight of the giant ketchup bottles, the number of restrooms, and the dimensions of the locker rooms, but here's another fun fact no one's in any hurry to publish.
Heinz Field hasn't been filled for a Steelers game in more than two years, and since its seating capacity expanded to 68,400 in 2015, Steelers Nation has put a butt in every one of 'em exactly once.
You'll perhaps remember the game against New England Dec. 17, 2017 _ the Jesse James game, as it were _ most notable not for how close it moved you toward homicide, but because that was the only time in club history 68,400 seats were necessary. Patriots 27, Steelers 24 drew 68,574.
The other 41 games over the past five seasons were pock-marked by gaps of bright yellow, and those were not Terrible Towels. Not even the two playoff games in that span required all 68,400 seats, despite both being 1 p.m. starts. In a city where the 21st century football fan is demonstrably afraid of the dark, you'd think a 1 o'clock kick with postseason urgency could avoid embarrassments like 3,876 no-shows for the Jaguars in January of 2018 and 5,674 no-shows for the Dolphins in January of 2017.
Granted, it was cold.
But in a league that's pulling down a bajillion dollars from multiple TV networks and where the ratings remain robust, does the density of the studio audience even matter anymore?
"Well, it definitely matters," said Steelers president Art Rooney II one day this week. "You want your building full or as full as you can get it, but I really wasn't disappointed this year (as the club averaged less than 63,000); when you take into account that we started out 0-3, we wound up losing our starting quarterback (in Week 2), and had two Monday night games and a December game flexed to a Sunday night, with all that, I really wasn't all that disappointed."
Rooney has publicly lamented the frequency of home night games before. Games that start after 8 p.m. around here are consistently among the worst attended. The brightest, yellowest game this season was the 8:15 p.m. start against the Bengals, when more than 10,000 no-shows dropped attendance to 57,959. More than 9,000 failed to show for another 8:15 start against the Dolphins. Two of the three worst-attended games this year and the three worst-attended games last year were all night games.
"We're not the only ones experiencing that," Rooney said. "We're similar to other markets, particularly in the northern climates, where fans are more sensitive to night games and more with cold weather."
NFL attendance in general sagged to its lowest level in 15 years in 2019. The Steelers were off only about 2% from 2018, but 15 teams experience declines, led by the Jacksonville Jaguars with a drop off of nearly nine percent. Only two teams saw significant increases (more than five percent), Washington and Buffalo.
Part of the reason is simply the slow realization by a new generation of fans that unlike baseball and hockey, football is way better on TV than in person. You can see it way better in your family room, from multiple angles, you didn't pay to park, there's no line for the bathroom, and the food is generally cheap and, often enough, good. Moreover, unlike at the stadium, the people babbling in your ear for three hours, the announcers, might actually provide something insightful to augment your viewing pleasure.
Might.
This was pretty much always the case, but more substantive changes are taking root in the behavior of the potential stadium audience.
"Things have changed dramatically now with secondary ticketing out there," Rooney said. "Access to tickets is different. People can wake up Sunday morning and decide whether they want to buy a ticket or sell a ticket. We're competing with more forms of home entertainment now. People are more sensitive than they used to be to game times. In the '70's and '80's, our people were coming no matter what."
This is true. Back in the Blackout Era, people around here drove to Steubenville to watch the Immaculate Reception game without even knowing it was the Immaculate Reception game.
"Now there are a lot more ways for people to find the game," Rooney said. "People's appetite for coming to live sporting events is changing, and sports in general are in the same situation."
I wouldn't start a GoFundMe page for the NFL just yet. The Steelers still sell out, still have a waiting list, and still innovate to spur people with tickets to actually show up. The danger for the league long term is that as the people watching on TV see more and more empty seats, they'll eventually think they're watching the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl and wonder, quite correctly, "What am I watching this for?"
There is, should you be wondering, only two demonstrable, empirical, full-proof ways to fill Heinz Field to its current capacity and beyond.
Play Penn State or Notre Dame.
