FIU football offering students free tablets to attend home games

The FIU Panthers seem like they might be getting a bit desperate in their attempts to improve attendance at home football games

If you’ve ever been to a home game for the FIU Panthers football team, you haven’t had a lot of company. The Panthers have long been dealing with attendance problems, even when it comes to their students. You know it’s kind of a dire situation when you can’t even get students to get to the games. However, the university has a way that they think they can remedy this. And let’s just say that it reeks of desperation.

For the 2016 college football season, FIU will essentially be giving away Android tablets and Amazon Fire TV Sticks to students who regularly attend games. No, this isn’t like a raffle or anything of that sort. If you go to enough games as an FIU student, you are going to get the goods.

The basics of the deal that they’re running are pretty simple. If a student attends five of the seven home FIU football games in 2016, they’ll get an Amazon Fire TV Stick. No strings attached; they simply are given the device. Overachieving students, though, that sign up for tickets and attend all seven home games will be given an Android tablet.

We’ve seen some towns do some pretty crazy things regarding bad college football teams before. Remember just last year, another florida team in the Central Florida had a local bar giving away free beer on game day until they won a game. However, the actual university stepping in here to give away free stuff is a new level.

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For what it’s worth, it doesn’t appear that the venture is working too well. Here was the FIU crowd for their Thursday night opener against the Indiana Hoosiers:

Considering the school is basically willing to pay their students to come to games and this is the turnout, this is just a bit troubling.