(03-26-2019 08:20 AM)goodknightfl Wrote:  

(03-25-2019 10:41 PM)MissouriStateBears Wrote:  Millenials aren't even in college anymore or very few remain. They are in the workforce now. It's on to Generation Z now.

They are not in the work force, they are in mommy's basement, living off the last couple of years free insurance from daddy's policy. Protesting for a big socialist gov't to keep the free ride coming..

That's not really true at all though. Perhaps in 2009 this was the case when they were 18 and the economy was in the toilet.

Millennials are in their 20s and 30s, nearly all work one or more jobs, and many are raising children.

When did we start labeling generations? More importantly, why did we? Does everyone in a given generation think alike? And if one generation starts in 1980 and the next one in 2000, what happens to everyone born in between? Somebody really needs to write down the rules.

FWIW, I was born before the "official" start of the Baby Boom and I don't have grandchildren old enough for college yet. So I can't ask them how they feel about this subject for a while.

(03-26-2019 08:54 AM)esayem Wrote:  What happened to all those Boomers that were hippies in the 60’s/70’s?

Oh I know, they got a job, made money, and now have season tickets to their school’s football team.

People change.

It was a different time. The Boomers that were "hippies in the 60's/70's" had the Vietnam War and the military draft to be concerned about. There was the Civil rights movement, the Women's liberation movement. There were race riots in the cities. Once all that settled down, you got a job, made money and got season tickets to your school's football team.

It is not so much that people change, the world changes. If you were a parent of a baby boomer, you grew up in the depression era. You were happy to have food on the table and a roof over your head. Baby boomers grew up in an era with limited TV options, when baseball was still America's pastime and World Series games were played during the day. There was no ESPN or internet or cell phones. Newspapers were a major source of news.

I really don't see a difference in desire to attend a sporting event or watch a sporting event between generations. It is more about affordability. Generation X is probably not as comfortable financially as the Baby Boomers, but they still attend sporting events. ‎Millennials and Generation Z have a lot of options and challenges ahead of them. Attending a sporting event will likely be at the bottom of their-to-do-list considering the expense, unless the tickets are free.

(03-26-2019 10:06 AM)debragga Wrote:  

(03-25-2019 10:41 PM)MissouriStateBears Wrote:  Millenials aren't even in college anymore or very few remain. They are in the workforce now. It's on to Generation Z now.

Depends on whose definition you use. The traditional students in college now were born between around 1995-2000, which is near the line of millennials/Gen Z. Most students older than that would be millennials.

The definition we used back at Missouri State doing research on the subject for marketing under grad work was as followed:

Greatest Generation 1910-1924
Silent Generation 1925-1944
Baby Boomers 1945-1964
Generation X 1965-1980
Millennials 1981-1995
Generation Z 1995-

(03-26-2019 10:54 AM)ken d Wrote:  When did we start labeling generations? More importantly, why did we? Does everyone in a given generation think alike? And if one generation starts in 1980 and the next one in 2000, what happens to everyone born in between? Somebody really needs to write down the rules.

FWIW, I was born before the "official" start of the Baby Boom and I don't have grandchildren old enough for college yet. So I can't ask them how they feel about this subject for a while.

Of course it's meaningless.

Humans are biologically pretty much all the same. The guy who stormed Normandy at age 19 would probably be glued to a smartphone at the same age if he had been born in 2000. A person born 5000 years ago and dropped into 2019 the day he was born would probably do just as well as someone born today. The only differences are the circumstances and technology with which people grow up.

I imagine the whole practice of blaming old people or young people for the ills of society has been around forever.

I'm Gen X and while I can't speak for my generation, my experience is that Boomers tend to pick a place and root for all the teams from that area that play the sports they are interested in. Gen X not so much. There is a crap ton of Gen X Braves and Cubs fans because we watched a lot of cable TV. A lot of Lakers, Celtics, and Bulls fans. Way too many Cowboys fans, quite a few Packers and Steelers. I know a couple Miami Hurricane fans and they've never seen them play in person.

The teams getting most TV play were the teams most accessible to us.

Maybe it's because most Gen Xers went through AState during the dark days of football but when I'm at games or fan/alumni events there is a hole in the demographics with Gen X under-represented. Boomers who went to AState support AState but they probably listen to the Hogs on radio or watch on TV when they can. Lot of GenX went "whole hog" and don't follow AState much. Millenials if they are interested in sports, if they went to AState, they support AState and actively root against the Hogs.

(03-26-2019 10:54 AM)ken d Wrote:  When did we start labeling generations? More importantly, why did we? Does everyone in a given generation think alike? And if one generation starts in 1980 and the next one in 2000, what happens to everyone born in between? Somebody really needs to write down the rules.

FWIW, I was born before the "official" start of the Baby Boom and I don't have grandchildren old enough for college yet. So I can't ask them how they feel about this subject for a while.

I'm technically part of Generation X, but I was born at the tail end of how that generation is defined (1978). As a result, I feel like I have a lot of the stereotypical social attributes of Gen X people, as I totally identify with the latch key kid upbringing and independence, but my cultural touchstones are based on the 1980s and 1990s, which are more Millennial-like. I once saw an opinion piece that people born during the years of the original Star Wars trilogy (1977 to 1983) are "Xennials" that have attributes of both generations. I definitely feel much older than Millennials (as I was taught to type on a typewriter instead of a computer), but then feel much younger than the Gen X-ers whose cultural references are heavily based on the 1970s (which I'm too young to remember at all).

Separately, the definition of an engaged fan has changed over generations:

Baby Boomer Fan = watch entire games in person as a season ticket holder
Generation X Fan = watch entire games on TV as a cable/satellite subscriber
Millennial Fan = watch clips of games on an app and follow team news on social media

Interest in sports for Millennials is still very high, but they're consumed in much different ways. Also, the absolute interest level of sports for Millennials compared to older generations is lower, but the relative power of sports for Millennials compared to everything else in pop culture might actually be higher compared to older generations because there are so few common cultural moments for people today. The market for TV shows, movies and pretty much everything else has such fragmented audiences that sports are still one of the few arenas in life that a wide critical mass of people follow. For instance, the absolute ratings for NFL Sunday Night Football on NBC are lower than Monday Night Football on ABC a generation ago, but SNF ranks #1 among all prime time programs nearly every week now, while the old MNF was usually behind 10 to 20 scripted shows each week in the ratings rankings. (The news is the other arena today that is still widely followed, but that unfortunately gets heavily filtered through the different partisan biases of people today.)

(03-28-2019 09:34 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  Separately, the definition of an engaged fan has changed over generations:

Baby Boomer Fan = watch entire games in person as a season ticket holder
Generation X Fan = watch entire games on TV as a cable/satellite subscriber
Millennial Fan = watch clips of games on an app and follow team news on social media

Interest in sports for Millennials is still very high, but they're consumed in much different ways. Also, the absolute interest level of sports for Millennials compared to older generations is lower, but the relative power of sports for Millennials compared to everything else in pop culture might actually be higher compared to older generations because there are so few common cultural moments for people today. The market for TV shows, movies and pretty much everything else has such fragmented audiences that sports are still one of the few arenas in life that a wide critical mass of people follow. For instance, the absolute ratings for NFL Sunday Night Football on NBC are lower than Monday Night Football on ABC a generation ago, but SNF ranks #1 among all prime time programs nearly every week now, while the old MNF was usually behind 10 to 20 scripted shows each week in the ratings rankings. (The news is the other arena today that is still widely followed, but that unfortunately gets heavily filtered through the different partisan biases of people today.)

That’s a good point. With the exception of Game Of Thrones, which is very much an anomaly, I really can’t think of any other TV show that is “must watch” in its original broadcast time. The current day is very much oriented toward streaming

(03-26-2019 11:19 AM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  

(03-26-2019 08:54 AM)esayem Wrote:  What happened to all those Boomers that were hippies in the 60’s/70’s?

Oh I know, they got a job, made money, and now have season tickets to their school’s football team.

People change.

It was a different time. The Boomers that were "hippies in the 60's/70's" had the Vietnam War and the military draft to be concerned about. There was the Civil rights movement, the Women's liberation movement. There were race riots in the cities. Once all that settled down, you got a job, made money and got season tickets to your school's football team.

It is not so much that people change, the world changes. If you were a parent of a baby boomer, you grew up in the depression era. You were happy to have food on the table and a roof over your head. Baby boomers grew up in an era with limited TV options, when baseball was still America's pastime and World Series games were played during the day. There was no ESPN or internet or cell phones. Newspapers were a major source of news.

I really don't see a difference in desire to attend a sporting event or watch a sporting event between generations. It is more about affordability. Generation X is probably not as comfortable financially as the Baby Boomers, but they still attend sporting events. ‎Millennials and Generation Z have a lot of options and challenges ahead of them. Attending a sporting event will likely be at the bottom of their-to-do-list considering the expense, unless the tickets are free.

Then how do you the define the Boomers that are still hippies, and did all of those movements settle down or just lose coverage? People are still talking about them today: different war, and the inequality of people. It appears to me that a lot of Boomers grew out of their “movement phase”.

Anyway, Millennials were the first generation wearing their fav player’s jersey and watching ESPN before school. Millennials are savvy when it comes to stats because they grew up with the internet and a dedicated sports network.

(03-26-2019 11:19 AM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  I really don't see a difference in desire to attend a sporting event or watch a sporting event between generations. It is more about affordability. Generation X is probably not as comfortable financially as the Baby Boomers, but they still attend sporting events. ‎Millennials and Generation Z have a lot of options and challenges ahead of them. Attending a sporting event will likely be at the bottom of their-to-do-list considering the expense, unless the tickets are free.

Nailed it.

Sports are a luxury to Millennials. You see the articles all the time about "Millennials are killing [Industry/Product X]," and all of those things - even home ownership - can be viewed through the lens of luxury. The Great Recession hit Millennials HARD, and wage stagnation coupled with rampant student debt means only a minority of Millennials are able to participate in the economy the way their predecessors have. Boomers have also worked much longer than their parents did, keeping jobs that should be held by Gen Xers and leaving Millennials frozen out of the kinds of jobs that would allow them to buy season tickets for sports teams. Many end up working two or more part-time jobs because fewer companies want to hire full-time employees and pay for a competitive benefits package. Once Millennials DO find a job like that, their first goal is not luxuries, it's digging themselves out of the debt they had to take on just to get by. Even then, some still have to get help from their parents to fill the gaps.

Millennials also have less enthusiastic relationships with their universities than Boomers do. When hit up for donations, most Millennials balk, either out of antipathy for a school that put them in massive debt or simply out of inability to afford to donate; this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of fundraising operations are run by Boomers still, and tend to cater to an older crowd. I've been to fundraising functions for a handful of D1 schools, and the average age could have easily been twice my own at most of them, if not all of them.

Generation Z takes all of these things one step further - many of them see the world they live in as utterly dysfunctional and in need of radical change... and they're already beginning to file into the workforce. They, too, will have to maximize their resources for utility, which means attending sporting events will take a backseat when they can watch many of them on NBC/ABC/CBS/Fox for the one-time cost of a TV and a $30 antenna.

I guess I don't have an answer to the OP on Gen X, but the suggestion that the future of sports - and college sports in particular - could be quite a bit different from its present is not at all off-base, IMO.

(03-29-2019 07:54 AM)esayem Wrote:  

(03-26-2019 11:19 AM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  

(03-26-2019 08:54 AM)esayem Wrote:  What happened to all those Boomers that were hippies in the 60’s/70’s?

Oh I know, they got a job, made money, and now have season tickets to their school’s football team.

People change.

It was a different time. The Boomers that were "hippies in the 60's/70's" had the Vietnam War and the military draft to be concerned about. There was the Civil rights movement, the Women's liberation movement. There were race riots in the cities. Once all that settled down, you got a job, made money and got season tickets to your school's football team.

It is not so much that people change, the world changes. If you were a parent of a baby boomer, you grew up in the depression era. You were happy to have food on the table and a roof over your head. Baby boomers grew up in an era with limited TV options, when baseball was still America's pastime and World Series games were played during the day. There was no ESPN or internet or cell phones. Newspapers were a major source of news.

I really don't see a difference in desire to attend a sporting event or watch a sporting event between generations. It is more about affordability. Generation X is probably not as comfortable financially as the Baby Boomers, but they still attend sporting events. ‎Millennials and Generation Z have a lot of options and challenges ahead of them. Attending a sporting event will likely be at the bottom of their-to-do-list considering the expense, unless the tickets are free.

Then how do you the define the Boomers that are still hippies, and did all of those movements settle down or just lose coverage? People are still talking about them today: different war, and the inequality of people. It appears to me that a lot of Boomers grew out of their “movement phase”.

Anyway, Millennials were the first generation wearing their fav player’s jersey and watching ESPN before school. Millennials are savvy when it comes to stats because they grew up with the internet and a dedicated sports network.

It is not so much that the movements end, people just need to earn money to live. Hippies were about the slogan, “Make Love, Not War.”
The Vietnam war brought everyone together because of the military draft. Once the war ended and Nixon ended the draft, people just go on with their lives. The wars today are different because there is no draft. Inequality still exists, but things are much better today than they were in the 1960's.

As a boomer from that time, I have friends that are still "hippies" and I have friends that are corporate executives. But we love our team sports and we all come together for team sports and other events. As far as stats go, I grew up a stats nut as a kid and we did not have the internet or ESPN. We got our information from newspapers, the radio, Street and Smiths, the Sporting News and other publications. I would strongly disagree that millennials are more savvy when it comes to stats.

(03-29-2019 08:08 AM)Mister Consistency Wrote:  Nailed it.

Sports are a luxury to Millennials. You see the articles all the time about "Millennials are killing [Industry/Product X]," and all of those things - even home ownership - can be viewed through the lens of luxury. The Great Recession hit Millennials HARD, and wage stagnation coupled with rampant student debt means only a minority of Millennials are able to participate in the economy the way their predecessors have. Boomers have also worked much longer than their parents did, keeping jobs that should be held by Gen Xers and leaving Millennials frozen out of the kinds of jobs that would allow them to buy season tickets for sports teams. Many end up working two or more part-time jobs because fewer companies want to hire full-time employees and pay for a competitive benefits package. Once Millennials DO find a job like that, their first goal is not luxuries, it's digging themselves out of the debt they had to take on just to get by. Even then, some still have to get help from their parents to fill the gaps.

Millennials also have less enthusiastic relationships with their universities than Boomers do. When hit up for donations, most Millennials balk, either out of antipathy for a school that put them in massive debt or simply out of inability to afford to donate; this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of fundraising operations are run by Boomers still, and tend to cater to an older crowd. I've been to fundraising functions for a handful of D1 schools, and the average age could have easily been twice my own at most of them, if not all of them.

Generation Z takes all of these things one step further - many of them see the world they live in as utterly dysfunctional and in need of radical change... and they're already beginning to file into the workforce. They, too, will have to maximize their resources for utility, which means attending sporting events will take a backseat when they can watch many of them on NBC/ABC/CBS/Fox for the one-time cost of a TV and a $30 antenna.

I guess I don't have an answer to the OP on Gen X, but the suggestion that the future of sports - and college sports in particular - could be quite a bit different from its present is not at all off-base, IMO.

Exactly. Every critique of millennials really needs to start with realization that our lives have been inextricably affected by 9/11 and the great recession in a way that for the most part other generations have not.

At it's core, I think this means that there is a high level distrust of institutions themselves - government, police, universities, and corporations that makes makes many hesitate to participate in even something as simple as donating and buying season tickets.

Anecdotally, I am a millennial (28) who is a season ticket holder. But among my entire friend group only one other person chooses to buy season tickets and we all graduated from SC. Many will come and tailgate for most or all games but when I ask why they don't just buy I always get "it's too expensive" or "they've gotten enough of my money/why would I?"

(03-29-2019 10:57 AM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  It is not so much that the movements end, people just need to earn money to live. Hippies were about the slogan, “Make Love, Not War.”
The Vietnam war brought everyone together because of the military draft. Once the war ended and Nixon ended the draft, people just go on with their lives. The wars today are different because there is no draft. Inequality still exists, but things are much better today than they were in the 1960's.

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but mostly just as an exercise

1) how expensive was tuition at your college?
2) did you graduate with student debt?
3) how quickly after graduation were you able to buy a home?

My parents are probably about your age, but they were able to pay for their tuition with summer/part time jobs (!!), graduated with no debt, and were able to put 20% down on a house within 3-4 years of graduating college.

(03-29-2019 10:57 AM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  

(03-29-2019 07:54 AM)esayem Wrote:  

(03-26-2019 11:19 AM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  

(03-26-2019 08:54 AM)esayem Wrote:  What happened to all those Boomers that were hippies in the 60’s/70’s?

Oh I know, they got a job, made money, and now have season tickets to their school’s football team.

People change.

It was a different time. The Boomers that were "hippies in the 60's/70's" had the Vietnam War and the military draft to be concerned about. There was the Civil rights movement, the Women's liberation movement. There were race riots in the cities. Once all that settled down, you got a job, made money and got season tickets to your school's football team.

It is not so much that people change, the world changes. If you were a parent of a baby boomer, you grew up in the depression era. You were happy to have food on the table and a roof over your head. Baby boomers grew up in an era with limited TV options, when baseball was still America's pastime and World Series games were played during the day. There was no ESPN or internet or cell phones. Newspapers were a major source of news.

I really don't see a difference in desire to attend a sporting event or watch a sporting event between generations. It is more about affordability. Generation X is probably not as comfortable financially as the Baby Boomers, but they still attend sporting events. ‎Millennials and Generation Z have a lot of options and challenges ahead of them. Attending a sporting event will likely be at the bottom of their-to-do-list considering the expense, unless the tickets are free.

Then how do you the define the Boomers that are still hippies, and did all of those movements settle down or just lose coverage? People are still talking about them today: different war, and the inequality of people. It appears to me that a lot of Boomers grew out of their “movement phase”.

Anyway, Millennials were the first generation wearing their fav player’s jersey and watching ESPN before school. Millennials are savvy when it comes to stats because they grew up with the internet and a dedicated sports network.

It is not so much that the movements end, people just need to earn money to live. Hippies were about the slogan, “Make Love, Not War.”
The Vietnam war brought everyone together because of the military draft. Once the war ended and Nixon ended the draft, people just go on with their lives. The wars today are different because there is no draft. Inequality still exists, but things are much better today than they were in the 1960's.

As a boomer from that time, I have friends that are still "hippies" and I have friends that are corporate executives. But we love our team sports and we all come together for team sports and other events. As far as stats go, I grew up a stats nut as a kid and we did not have the internet or ESPN. We got our information from newspapers, the radio, Street and Smiths, the Sporting News and other publications. I would strongly disagree that millennials are more savvy when it comes to stats.

I never said Millennials are more stat savvy, that’s an impossible comment. I’m on the X/Millennial border so I had a surplus of magazines, library books, and internet (also the interest) to pretty much out-stat any Boomer I knew growing up.

(03-29-2019 02:41 PM)Gamecock Wrote:  

(03-29-2019 10:57 AM)SoCalBobcat78 Wrote:  It is not so much that the movements end, people just need to earn money to live. Hippies were about the slogan, “Make Love, Not War.”
The Vietnam war brought everyone together because of the military draft. Once the war ended and Nixon ended the draft, people just go on with their lives. The wars today are different because there is no draft. Inequality still exists, but things are much better today than they were in the 1960's.

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but mostly just as an exercise

1) how expensive was tuition at your college?
2) did you graduate with student debt?
3) how quickly after graduation were you able to buy a home?

My parents are probably about your age, but they were able to pay for their tuition with summer/part time jobs (!!), graduated with no debt, and were able to put 20% down on a house within 3-4 years of graduating college.

Okay. Since you asked:

1. Tuition at Texas State (then Southwest Texas State) was $200-$250 per semester full-time. I stayed in the dorm the first year and room & board was $454.00 per semester.
2. Yes, I did graduate with debt, about $5,000. That was paid off nine years later.
3. About 25 years after I graduated I bought a home.

I too had summer jobs/part-time jobs to help pay expenses. I moved to Southern California a few years after graduation and buying a home out here is not easy. Plus, I got comfortable living in rent controlled apartments near the beach. My father was a military officer and we moved around a lot. So I went to junior high school in San Francisco, California, first two years of high school in Texas and my last two years of high school in Naples, Italy. A large portion of my friends from Italy ended in Southern California. Probably more information than you needed for your exercise.

Another factor for why Millenials aren't college sports loyalists is that we feel betrayed by our alma maters. We were sold a bill of goods and told our degrees were our ticket to prosperity. Many Millenials went into serious student debt doing so while our boomer parents encouraged us to do so because for many of them a degree was the out of reach door opener they sought to attain. Then the economy tanked, we entered the workforce with no experience and meaningless degrees. The boomers pushed back their retirements and Gen Xers with years of valuable experience beat us out for what opportunities that were out there. It's taken years for many Millenials to reach the levels of success that we expected straight out of college. We simply don't have the disposable income to be regular attendees of college football games. Meanwhile our alma maters call us up for donations before we've even finished paying off our tuition.

I was born one year before you Frank (1977), and, thanks to a scholarship & my dad graduated with no debt. However, it was very hard for me to find a job. I married a millennial who had lots of student debt. I have been in my current job for 15 years, but can’t wait to leave it. My parents are Boomers also, and told me I needed a college degree.

(03-26-2019 10:54 AM)ken d Wrote:  When did we start labeling generations? More importantly, why did we? Does everyone in a given generation think alike? And if one generation starts in 1980 and the next one in 2000, what happens to everyone born in between? Somebody really needs to write down the rules.

FWIW, I was born before the "official" start of the Baby Boom and I don't have grandchildren old enough for college yet. So I can't ask them how they feel about this subject for a while.

The study of marketing helps identify these groups. While individuals are unique, generations have traits that can be identified.

One of the best books I read last year was this book. If you can get over the title, you may really find enlightenment from his data and commentary.