Rumor: Regents met to discuss Michigan Stadium capacity limit in 2020
Rumor going around that the Regents met and had a meeting discussing the attendance cap at Michigan Stadium for 2020.
There apparently is a plan in place for 20,000 fans with students getting first dibs.
Take it fwiw. Lot of other schools discussing the same things right now. Iowa State announced today season ticket holders only will be able to attend games.
So everyone who wanted to attend a Cyclone game will get to go still?
Iowa State picked up a big-time player from the transfer market:
https://www.theonion.com/heavenly-sources-confirm-jesus-christ-will-transfer-to-1843674452
20,000 socially distanced students in winged masks could be intimidating, I guess...
Not if they show up late and drunk. Hey-down in front!
Will they show up on time and stay for the 4th qtr???
I'm cool with it being students. I also know this sounds ABSOLUTELY INSANE in 2020 -- but I wonder if they would refund student ticket costs (if already sold -- I assume so -- it's been a while since that's been me) and make them free. They would get the 20k (I am pretty sure this is near the average student ticket number anyway -- but that's just an uninformed guess).
There is zero chance of that happening. Zero.
UM (like pretty much all institutions) is going through huge budget cuts. People have already been furloughed, and if the revenue picture doesn't change, will be laid off.
The regents would stir up a (deserved) giant shit storm if they forgo revenue in order that students get free seats.
It's proper that a significant number of seats out of the 20k be set aside for the students; they are the reason the university exists. But they already (correctly) get a discount on this optional purchase; a further discount is not going to happen.
Yeah, 0 chance it would be free. You'd likely get a refund and then have to purchase individual game tickets.
Students have ~20K out of 100k (ballparking), so let's say 20%. Maybe they get 25% of the capacity this year or something.
I can't imagine all 20k being set aside for students. Especially when they leave at halftime, lol.
If they don't get free tickets during a normal year, why would they get free tickets now? The athletic department needs that revenue more than ever right now.
"Once again, we thank you for being part of a crowd watching a football game in America today"
I guarantee you they still announce the crowd as no less than 105,000.
will you still do a fly-over with that few in attendance?
Not in those colors I'm not.
indeed.
It would be difficult to sell 85,000 bottles of Coke every week.
"Counting" was the only thing Dave Brandon was good at.
That sounds about right, but I'd think about 20k short. Let's take 100k paying / ticketed fans as starting number
* Figuring the bowl itself holds about 75k fans (someone can fact check me), if you figure 1 fan for every three seats, then that gets you to 25k in stadium
* Student tickets last year were about 20k, so figure same number sign up, and some sort of rationing goes one where each student gets half the games? So in the bowl, you have 10-15k students and the rest paid attendees.
* Then figure suite and premium seating is about 25k total, if you go 1 fan for every two seats since those are more spaced out already than the bench seats, then you're looking at ~12k additional.
Add all these up (10k students, 15k paid bowl seats, 12k premium attendees) and you're looking at about 40k attendees per game.
I think part of the issue is bathrooms, lines to get in, concessions, etc. The stadium itself can of course seat more but the logistics can't support it.
that's easy.
1. Each ticket will get a pre-assigned window of time to visit concessions and a separate one for bathrooms.
2. Also, every home game gets a flyover but instead of B-52s or another historic plane, it will be a combo of crop dusters dropping disinfectant.
3. Ah, forgot to mention, all home-games will be maize outs. Each bowl ticket will receive a maize poncho. see #2 for purpose
Aside from the fact that these are all made-up numbers anyway, where do you come up with 1 every 2/3 seats? Those seats are maybe a foot and a half wide, if that, and you're within a couple feet of the person in front of and behind you. Call it 2 feet wide per seat and 3 feet between rows, and you end up filling one of every 20ish seats. (You, 3 seats on either side, 5 seats in the rows in front of and behind you, and 1-3 in the next rows past that.)
20k is less dangerous than 100k, and I guess if the assumption is that they're students and living in close proximity anyway then it's fine?
No one’s going to stay in their seats, especially if they’re 18-22 year old students. They’ll all move down closer and act like “who’s going to stop me?” The 75 year-old usher will stop them? I doubt it.
Yeah, this is the thing. It's not the plan, it's the implementation of the plan.
Let's say you fill every fifth seat. What do you do when everybody given a ticket low in the end zone realizes there are thousands of empty seats between the 20s? Maybe you can trust people to just sit in their assigned seats, but in my experience that isn't a real-world approach: the emptier the stadium, the freer people feel to move around and grab any unoccupied seat.
I think you would have to bring in a real security staff, and not just volunteer ushers.
why bother? Seriously, what's the point in trying to socially distance all those students on a saturday afternoon when they just spent their friday night packed shoulder to shoulder at some party?
The host of the party doesn't have some PR obligation to look like they're doing something to help.
The University of Michigan very much does have that PR obligation. If you are going to exclude 80,000 ticket holders from the game, you better make it look like there is an actual reason that you are doing it.
to protect the other 80,000 obviously.
^^^^^^^^^^^
THIS!
Further, the host of the party is a lot less of a lawsuit target that the University
The 75-year old usher better stay at home unless he has a death wish.
Scanner Blue will stop them. Mark my words.
Hey now I’ve only had one bloody nose trying to keep the peace in the Stadium and I am still pretty spry for my late 50’s.
Nonsense. We all know college students are a responsible group of people who will follow the rules that are given to them.
Just, look at the alcohol policy. It clearly says no alcohol can be brought into Michigan Stadium and I can’t think of a single instance when a student has dared to violate that directive.
What I have trouble with, even with 20K fans regardless of where they are located is logistics. How will the flow of people in, out and around the Stadium going to work and still maintain social distancing? Are we going to cross the street and maintain social distancing? How about the line where they scan our tickets? Is every third urinal available? If someone sneezes in the bathroom...a September thunderstorm where he need to get inside?
I just don't see how this works.
Mandate masks when entering/walking around the stadium and the social distancing aspect of getting to and from the stadium and seats are reduced.
The seating is the interesting thing. You can't just do one person every 3-4 seats because most, if not all, of your non-student season ticket holders (assuming they would get a portion of the available tickets) aren't single ticket holders, you aren't going to get 20,000 people going to the stadium as singles. So they would need to plan for group sitting together.
And then for the attendees, would you split the season amongst all ticket holders or just pick the 20,000 that want to go and the rest are shit out of luck - although I assume a not insignificant portion of the season ticket holders would not plan on attending and would willingly/gladly take a refund this year. I also assume you would have to physically block out the benches to prevent people from moving and bunching but if you split the games that would vary game to game. The whole thing sounds like a logistical nightmare. The easiest thing would be to only have students and have them sit in single seats and block off the non-used seats but I'm not sure if that would ever fly
Put all the students on the 50 together. They will be like family after a week on campus anyway.
Wear a mask if you’re so worried about a few minutes with a lack of social distancing.
Yeah, I did the math one day when I was bored and with trying to be close to the 6' distance but allowing some pairing of people, the maximum capacity they could put in the stadium would be less than 15%.
I think any self respecting university with plenty of free brains looking for a research project could fit close to 40% if they did the math right.
Think about groups of people being in "pods" and each "pod" needs to stay away from the other "pods". ie you could have a family of 4 sitting together, but 6 feet from another family of 4. This way you could theoretically get a much higher density in the same space.
Bathroom lines can be "distanced" but honestly how hard would it be to find a bathroom at 40% capacity?
I'm wondering how long it would take to get 40K fans through the gates? Seems like it should be faster, but only if can they keep all the lines open. The logistics of managing the lines doesn't sound like fun for anyone.
It's not just one fan every three seats across every row. Rows have to be empty/split so you're not going to have knees in your back this year. I would assume the bowl holds the 100K and premium is the extra 7K or so, plus it's easier to work with round numbers. If they're saying 20K in the stadium, that's only 20% of capacity, which may still be an aggressive number considering how closer the seats are.
This plan makes a lot of sense. Young people are at very low risk of death, and they will already be together on campus. I will happily stay home if they get to attend.
Out of curiosity, does anybody have a rough count of our season ticket holders? I'm guessing well over 20,000 even without the students
in 2019, there were 71,578 non-student season tickets.
Plus another 20-21k student tickets.
I have no issue with a plan,, starting with the worst scenario...but it needs to have the flexibility to evolve as this dynamic evolves. At this point everything has been based in predictive crap...the The model is flawed, and more importantly, it hasn't adjusted as the situation adjusts in many cases. The state of Michigan first and foremost
Posted this in another thread but thought a lot of the detail in the article is relevant to this topic.
It looks like studies indicate outside is relatively safe (1 out of 300 plus outbreaks in China happened outside and a Japan study said transmission is 19 times more likely indoors.)
Somebody also posted this study that asymptomatic carriers may be a low transmission risk.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7219423/
All of this would seem to indicate we could pull off low attendance Michigan games. Key points would be use of FLIR type cameras to detect people with high temps entering the stadium and/or temperature checks when they scan tickets. (does not catch everyone by could catch those most likely to be super spreaders)
The bathrooms are the other issue. Limiting the number of people in them would be key though 20% capacity in the stadium would help. It also would be helpful to seriously upgrade the ventilation systems in them. Some exhaust fans pulling air through MERV 13 or higher filters would do the trick.
Overall, there are some positive signs we could hold games with 20K or so people in the stadium and keep it safe.
Thanks to the link to the science piece. It cotes some interesting information
“But in a recent preprint, Adam Kucharski of LSHTM estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1. “Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,” Kucharski says.
That could explain some puzzling aspects of this pandemic, including why the virus did not take off around the world sooner after it emerged in China, and why some very early cases elsewhere—such as one in France in late December 2019, reported on 3 May—apparently failed to ignite a wider outbreak. If k is really 0.1, then most chains of infection die out by themselves and SARS-CoV-2 needs to be introduced undetected into a new country at least four times to have an even chance of establishing itself, Kucharski says. If the Chinese epidemic was a big fire that sent sparks flying around the world, most of the sparks simply fizzled out.“
it is also interesting to note that while the paper says outdoor transmission is much less likely,”The report about the choir in Washington made her realize that one thing links numerous clusters: They happened in places where people shout or sing.”
Glad somebody is doing some research on asymptomatic spread. The idea that we all need to stay home because we *could be* infected and spread it even though we're showing no symptoms is ridiculous. I'd bet good money that asymptomatic people are way less likely to infect others (and of course most people are not even infected at all).
I've tried to see this from as many angles as possible, most refuted and unpopular...but I've never concerned myself with popular...assume the spread from the very first wave...in the US we have currently 1.72 million confirmed cases. This does not account for those who never sought medical treatment, received valid testing, etc...the number should be much higher, nobody has refuted that. We took several weeks to resort to any type of distancing, draconian lockdown measures, masks, etc...
here we are with close to 2 million confirmed with flattening the curve successfully. We have a better idea how it works, though no conclusive solutions just yet. At this point, a 'second wave' is projected though it's just speculation, we can't guarantee the future plain and simple. Assuming 2 million-plus were infected already...wouldn't that infection rate, and sadly even death rate reduce the spread naturally? SCIENCE is showing results for immunity in many. DATA is showing heavy concentrations in nursing homes and big city epicenters. Rural areas not so much. Knowing what we know, and believing some will continue shelter in place on their own, continue to wear masks, social distance out of fear, personal awareness to conditions, self-preservation, and I'd even bet if someone is actually sick...may stay home for fear of entering a workplace coughing and sneezing could a second wave prove to be less impactful if it happens at all?...
It's not a question of I'm wrong, you must be right, stop the propaganda and go back to fox news...it's hey...what if.
I can’t cite the article but I believe I read a few days ago that Sweden, a country that did not practice social distancing terribly hard, had a CV19 infection rate throughout its population of under 10%. Serilogic antibody testing was used to get the data.
interesting. So does that imply everyone was tested and it spread to 10% or less? Only 10% contracted it and developed antibodies (excluding the deceased who caught it and possibly spread it). How many in the US have come in contact with it, showed no symptoms, never got it, and it just passed right on through? Was that due to their own immune system strength? Lack of enough viral load (which implies this isn't as 'strong' as many once thought it could be...sounds a lot like our progress with HIV/AIDS where the fears of how easy it was to die, was quickly shortened to the ways you cannot get it, vs the obvious routes of contracting it, and even then...it either remains HIV or progresses and tears down the immune system. And NO I AM NOT calling it HIV/AIDS...it's simply sounding off patterning.
study in France is very positive as well showing all of the front line medical who had exposure to COVID show antibodies consistent with prevention from re-infection. And on the same page, another article Fauci stated a vaccine in 2020 is a real possibility...that one seems a little more long range optimism for a number of reasons.