Breakthrough IU football season yields big tourism dollars for Bloomington
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For the second consecutive Tuesday, Indiana University’s football team was ranked in the top 10 by the College Football Playoff Selection Committee.
Checking in at No. 5, IU football already boasts the most wins (10) in program history in an astonishing ascent to the top levels of the sport just a year after winning only three games.
The football team’s newfound success is also leading to a boom in tourism around Bloomington, with sell-out crowds boosting the bottom lines of bars, restaurants and hotels in the city.
Visit Bloomington Executive Director Mike McAfee estimates that a sellout home football game generates $6 million to $7 million in economic impact. And with a favorable schedule that sees IU play eight home games this year, that’s a hefty influx of cash to the Bloomington area.
McAfee said revenue for Bloomington lodging in October was up 19% over October 2023. And for the Friday and Saturday of IU’s most recent game against Michigan, lodging revenue was about 30% higher than for IU’s home game against Rutgers in late October 2023.
“Winning is like beer and bacon—it makes everything better. It’s driving demand, and high demand leads to more revenue,” McAfee said.
Even when the team is losing, IU football still produces more economic impact than any other tourism event in the city. So how much impact can be traced to winning?
Dollars and wins
According to David Pierce, chair of the Tourism, Event & Sport Management Department at IU Indianapolis, it’s tough to say how much winning correlates to economic output. But he said a little math can go a long way.
Pierce figures IU’s stadium will be sold out for the last five home games of the year, while attendance numbers from past years suggest more sparsely attended games when the team is struggling. Taking five home games with 52,000 people in the stadium versus 38,000, for instance, yields about 70,000 more people.
Pierce estimates between 65% and 75% of ticket holders come from out of town, which yields, conservatively, 45,000 more people who are visiting Bloomington this year than if the team was having a middling season.
If visitors spend an average of $500 on their trips, Pierce said, the dollars add up.
“That’s between $21 and $25 million of direct spending in Bloomington that would not have happened,” Pierce said. Using “super rough math, it’s not insignificant.”
Those numbers don’t count the people who have made the trek to Bloomington for a game without having a ticket.
Hotels and restaurants are the recipients of much of the spending. But they aren’t the only ones benefiting from the team’s success. The school is a big beneficiary.
Season ticket sales for next year will see a bump, and Pierce predicts IU’s athletic department will see an influx of donations.
Pierce added the university could also see an increase in applications thanks to the successful football season. That’s in part because the football season lines up neatly with the deadline for undergraduate applications. The fact IU is increasingly targeting out-of-state and international students makes a bump more likely given that pool of applicants is more likely to be influenced by things like sporting success and campus culture.
Pierce pointed to Butler University, which saw a 55% increase in applications in a three-year span after the school made surprise back-to-back Final Four runs in men’s basketball.
Don’t say playoff
There’s a lot of football left to be played, but there’s a possibility that either IU or the University of Notre Dame (ranked No. 8 as of Nov. 13) could host a College Football Playoff game.
CFP rules reported by The Athletic stipulate that home teams are required to provide visitors with an allotment of 3,500 tickets, which leads both Pierce and McAfee to speculate that a playoff game in either Bloomington or South Bend would look similar to the team’s biggest home games of the year in direct revenues.
But, similarly to when College Gameday came to IU in October, the media buzz around a playoff game would result in millions of dollars worth of free advertising for host cities.
“No doubt about it, if that happened, that would be the highest tourism producing December in our history,” McAfee said. “What an amazing boon that would be.”