Throughout JT Reale’s time spent at UF, he has never participated in the UF student football lottery.
Reale, a 20-year-old public relations senior, is part of a growing trend of students who feel that the college football experience is about more than just the game.
"I don’t see the need to enter the lottery," he said.
According to The Wall Street Journal, declining student ticket sales has become an escalating trend on college campuses nationwide.
The Journal found a 22-percent decrease in attendance at UF football games from 2009 to 2013. Meanwhile, student attendance nationally decreased by 7.1 percent on average since 2009.
Daniel Apple, assistant director of communications for UAA, wrote in an email that UAA did not sell out for season tickets this year.
"I don’t think there is one particular reason that the numbers declined," he said.
"I think that there are many factors and that it’s a nationwide problem that schools are losing student attendance and attendance in general," he added.
However, Apple said UF still has the fourth-highest student attendance in the country.
Bre Rouse, a 22-year-old UF architecture senior, has never entered the lottery because she does not have time to attend the games, which can be all-day affairs.
She said the declining attendance could be attributed to the football team not playing as well as they have in previous seasons.
"It’s not exciting anymore, so people don’t want to go," she said. "When it’s exciting, people go. When it’s not, they don’t."
On Sunday, about 1,500 student lottery tickets remained unsold.
But even without selling out student lottery tickets at the Idaho game, which was later suspended and ruled a no contest, the UAA sold more student tickets for the opening game than were sold for the 2013 opener against Toledo, Apple said.
Reale wondered if more students would buy tickets if they were sold on a game-by-game basis instead of packaged in the lottery.
"Personally, I know a lot of my friends do the same thing that I do," he said.
He added, "They just buy guest tickets for the games they want to go to"
Within the UAA, Apple said there is always an ongoing discussion to see what can be done to improve the process of student ticket sales.
Even through the rain, he said Saturday’s game was a testament to how much UF students come out to support the Gator football team.
[A version of this story ran on page 3 on 9/4/2014 under the headline "Student football ticket sales declining slowly across nation"]
