How College Athletic Departments Can Elevate Game Day Now
College athletics is in the middle of one of the most financially turbulent periods in its history. The House v. NCAA settlement has introduced revenue sharing requirements that, for many schools, represent an additional $20 million or more in annual costs on top of already strained budgets. Big Ten schools, despite holding the largest media contract in college sports, averaged over $48 million in net operating losses last year, before revenue sharing adds another layer of pressure. Rutgers posted a deficit exceeding $70 million in fiscal year 2024 alone. And those are power conference programs. For Group of Five and FCS schools, the math is even harder.
In that environment, game presentation and fan experience are almost always among the first areas where investment gets pulled back. The staff gets leaner. The part-time budget gets cut. The content creation team gets stretched. And the fan, the person who bought a ticket, drove to campus, and chose to spend their Saturday or Wednesday evening at your venue instead of somewhere else really feels every bit of it.
Here is what I have learned after more than thirty years working at the highest levels of sports and live entertainment: you do not need a massive budget or a world-class production team to create a fan experience worth coming back for. You need a plan, the right outside perspective, and a few small changes applied consistently and with intention.
This article is written for athletic directors, marketing directors, and anyone overseeing game presentation in college athletics. Because the opportunity in front of you right now, even in a constrained budget environment, is bigger than you may realize.
Part One: The Real State of College Fan Experience Today
The Pressure Is Real and It's Changing Everything
College athletic departments today are being asked to do more with less at exactly the moment when the competition for the fan's time, attention, and dollar has never been more intense. The fan sitting on their couch has access to the same game on a 85-inch screen with better camera angles, instant replay, and no parking. The student body which is your most natural audience and your most important long-term fan base is spending an average of over two hours a day on social media, consuming content from athletes they follow personally on TikTok and Instagram. NIL has fundamentally shifted the relationship between fan and athlete; fans can now interact directly with and financially support the players on your roster in ways that don't require them to ever set foot in your venue.
All of this means the question of why a fan should come to the game in person, and come back, has never been more important to answer well. And yet most athletic departments are answering it with the same formula they used fifteen years ago.
The full-time game presentation staff, if it exists at all, is small and overextended. Part-time crews are often composed of students who are enthusiastic but undertrained and under-directed. Content is produced reactively rather than strategically. Sponsorship and marketing departments, with their own revenue pressures and their own legitimate priorities, can end up driving game day decisions that prioritize commercial messages over fan engagement, filling timeouts with advertising reads and ceremony obligations that grind the energy of the building to a halt.
The result is a game day experience that feels unmanaged, not because the people running it don't care, but because they don't have the bandwidth, the resources, or the outside perspective to see it the way a first-time fan sees it.
The Alumni Dollar Is the Most Valuable Dollar in the Building
Here is something every athletic director knows but that doesn't always translate into how game day is designed: the alumni who attend your games are not just ticket buyers. They are potential major donors, endowment contributors, and lifelong institutional partners. The experience they have on game day shapes how they feel about the institution, not just the team.
Getting an alum through the gate is the first step. Once they are in the building, experiencing a thoughtfully produced game day, one where they feel the organization is proud of what it has built, where the energy is right and the production is clean, the conversation about a naming rights gift, a scholarship fund, or an upgraded premium package becomes a very different one than it would be after a game day that felt like nobody was paying attention.
Fan experience is not a soft investment. It is a development tool. And in the current financial climate of college athletics, that framing matters.
It Is Not Just Football and Basketball
One of the most consistent gaps I find when working with college athletic departments is that fan experience investment is concentrated almost entirely in football and men's basketball, the two sports most likely to have some version of a game presentation budget, while every other sport is left to figure it out on their own.
We have worked with athletic departments to elevate fan experience across a much wider range of sports than most people expect: baseball, softball, water polo, field hockey, track and field, volleyball, soccer, and more. The principles of a well-produced game day experience translate across every sport. The investment required scales accordingly. And the impact on attendance, student engagement, and community connection at those sports can be disproportionately large relative to the cost, precisely because the bar is so much lower and the opportunity for a meaningful improvement is so clear.
A well-produced women's volleyball match, with the right audio, the right content, engaged PA announcing, and a small but energized crew, can become a genuinely compelling game day event that builds a loyal local following, generates positive press for the athletic department, and demonstrates to the broader campus community that the school takes all of its programs seriously. That is a real return on a modest investment.
Part Two: Small Changes, Real Impact — What Any School Can Do
The Case for a Small, Nimble Outside Partner
Athletic departments facing budget constraints tend to think about outside help in one of two ways: they either can't afford it, or they imagine it means a large agency of record with a multi-year contract and a fee structure that doesn't make sense for their situation. Both assumptions are worth reconsidering.
A small, specialized agency, one built around people with deep experience in professional and college sports across marketing, game presentation, ticketing, venue operations, content creation, and especially fan experience, can provide the kind of multi-disciplinary expertise that no single consultant and no full-time hire can match, at a price point that reflects the realities of college athletic budgets. These teams are nimble. They move quickly, work directly with your existing staff, and deliver impact that is visible on game day rather than buried in a report.
The value of an outside partner is not just in what they know, it is in how they see. When you have been managing the same game day for three seasons, you stop seeing what a first-time fan sees. The outside perspective, walking into your venue as if for the first time, experiencing every touchpoint from the parking lot to the final buzzer, is one of the most valuable things an external partner brings. It reveals what familiarity has made invisible.
The Fan Experience Touch-points That Matter Most
From the moment a fan arrives until the moment they leave, every touchpoint is either building goodwill or eroding it. The most impactful changes are rarely the most expensive ones.
Audio that is set at the right level and actually sounds good throughout the venue, not just near the PA mixer, changes the entire feel of a game day. Content that reflects the personality and identity of that program specifically, rather than generic graphics that could belong to any school, tells a fan that the organization is proud of what it has built. A PA announcer who is engaged, energetic, and genuinely feels like the voice of that program creates a sense of occasion that elevates even a routine regular season game. Student sections that are activated and led, rather than left to organize themselves, generate an energy that is contagious and that money genuinely cannot buy.
These are not expensive interventions. They are intentional ones. And they require someone whose job it is to think about them specifically, not in addition to three other job responsibilities.
Reclaiming Game Day From Sponsorship Overload
One of the most common and damaging patterns I see in college athletics is a game day that has been overtaken by commercial obligations, too many sponsor reads, too many ceremony presentations, too many elements that serve the marketing or sponsorship department's contractual needs at the direct expense of the fan's experience of the game itself.
Sponsorship revenue is essential and sponsorship obligations are real. But there is a meaningful difference between a game day that integrates sponsorship thoughtfully, in ways that feel native to the flow of the game and add engagement to the fan's experience, and one that interrupts the game repeatedly with commercial messaging that pulls fans out of the moment they came to experience.
The best game presentation teams work in genuine partnership with their marketing and sponsorship colleagues to find the integration that serves everyone, the sponsor, the department, and the fan. That requires someone at the table whose primary responsibility is the fan experience, with enough authority and enough organizational alignment to hold that standard. Too often in college athletics, that voice is either absent or outweighed.
The Student Body Is an Untapped Resource
College athletic departments have something professional sports organizations don't: a campus full of talented, motivated, energetic young people who are already invested in the success of the teams and who are actively looking for meaningful experience in sports, media, production, and marketing.
A well-structured student worker program, with clear training, clear expectations, meaningful roles, and real mentorship from full-time staff, is one of the highest-leverage investments an athletic department can make. Students who are properly trained and genuinely empowered to contribute to game day production don't just fill seats on a part-time crew roster. They become advocates for the program, ambassadors for the brand, and in many cases the next generation of full-time professionals in this industry.
The key word is structured. A student worker program without training, direction, and investment from the full-time staff is not a resource, it is managed chaos. With it, it is one of the most cost-effective and genuinely impactful tools available to a college athletic department.
Part Three: How CUENTO Works With College Athletic Departments
More Than an Assessment, It’s A Partnership
At CUENTO Marketing, our approach to college athletics is built around one foundational belief: a report sitting in a drawer doesn't change a fan experience. What changes a fan experience is ingrained, sustained partnership with the people who are actually running game day.
We do assess, walking into your venue as a first-time fan would, evaluating every touchpoint from arrival to departure, and benchmarking what we find against our experience across professional and collegiate sports at every level. But the assessment is a starting point, not the product. What we are actually delivering is a partnership that works alongside your full-time staff, your part-time crew, and your students to make specific, measurable improvements that show up on game day.
Every voice matters in that process. The full-time marketing director who has been trying to make the case for a specific change for two years and hasn't had the organizational support to make it happen. The part-time PA announcer who has a clear sense of what's working and what isn't but has never been asked. The student camera operator who has ideas about content that nobody has thought to solicit. We hear all of it. And we use all of it.
Content That Reflects Who You Actually Are
Content is where many college athletic departments are leaving the most opportunity on the table. Not because they lack talented people, most departments have creative staff who care deeply about the work, but because those people are stretched thin, working reactively, and without the specialized game day production expertise that translates great content into great in-venue moments.
We work with internal creative teams to strengthen what they already do well, and we can provide people who understand the specific demands of in-venue content, who can work at the pace college athletics requires, and who deliver at a quality level that reflects the program well, at price points that make sense for college budgets. The goal is always content that feels specific to that program, that campus, that community. Not templated. Not generic. Genuinely yours.
Fractional Leadership and Strategic Advisory When You Need It Most
For athletic departments navigating significant change, a new athletic director, a conference transition, a major venue renovation, or simply a moment where the gap between where the program is and where it should be has become impossible to ignore, we can provide something beyond consulting: direct, peer-to-peer strategic counsel for athletic directors and senior leadership managing critical institutional decisions.
We also deploy fractional leadership for departments that need to scale their capacity immediately without adding long-term overhead. A fractional AD for Fan Experience, embedded in your operation, brings senior-level expertise exactly when and where it is needed, managing day-to-day execution, mentoring existing staff, and building the systems and processes that outlast the engagement.
And for departments where the daily operational grind is the biggest obstacle, where good people are burning out trying to keep pace with a schedule that doesn't leave room to think strategically, we help streamline workflows, integrate more efficient tools and processes, and build leaner systems that protect your staff and make the whole operation more resilient.
Built for Every Level — Not Just the Power Four
We work with Division I, Division II, and FBS programs. We work with Power Four schools that have real resources and are trying to compete at the highest level of fan experience. We work with mid-major and Group of Five schools that have tighter budgets and need partners who understand how to do more with less. We work with small non-FBS programs that are trying to build something meaningful for their community from a nearly blank slate.
Every partnership is custom built for the school, the sport, the market, and the moment. There is no off-the-shelf solution here because the problem is never exactly the same twice. What is consistent is our process: we start from the fan's experience, we work with the people already in the building, and we focus relentlessly on the specific improvements that will be felt on game day, not in a slide deck.
The Opportunity in the Constraint
The financial pressure on college athletics right now is real and it is not going away. But within that pressure is an opportunity that too many departments are missing: the fan experience improvements that matter most are not the expensive ones. They are the intentional ones. The ones that require someone to care enough to see the game day the way the fan sees it, and to make the specific, consistent, thoughtful changes that turn a first-time attendee into a lifelong supporter.
That first-time fan sitting in your arena or your stadium for the first time is not comparing your production to the NFL. They are comparing it to every other experience competing for their time and money. If the game day is well-produced, energetic, clearly cared-for — if the sound is right and the content is specific and the people working the event clearly want them there — that fan comes back. They bring someone next time. They buy a season ticket. They give to the athletic fund. They write a check to name the press box.
It starts with game day. It starts with the experience. And it doesn't have to cost nearly as much as you think.
Matt Coy is VP of Experiences at CUENTO Marketing. CUENTO works with college athletic departments across all divisions to assess, elevate, and sustain fan experience through partnership, content, game day execution, and fractional leadership. To learn more, visit cuentomarketing.com.
