Why is Football Culture So Muted at Columbia?

The Columbia Lions secured its only win of the season in the 2025-26 home opener against the Georgetown Hoyas. The Lions will play their final regular season game on the road Nov. 22 against the Cornell Big Red. (Credit: Rachel Zhong)

College football is the second-largest sport in the U.S., trailing only the NFL, and its stadiums often surpass the professional ones in seating capacity. College arenas will swell with school spirit on Saturday afternoons at universities around the country, but not for the Columbia University Lions.

The team had its home opener on Sept. 27, bringing home the Lou Little Cup trophy with the win against Georgetown University. Some 3,900 attendees at the stadium witnessed their first victory of the season, but barely filled a quarter of the seats.

Last year, the Lions averaged a home attendance of 5,626, about 33% of the student population, in their urban stadium on 218th Street. It was a low number compared to attendance in the Big Ten, where stadiums are built to host tens of thousands, but average for the Ivy League, which has historically placed less emphasis on sports.

“The Ivy League meant the NCAA conference, but now it just refers to, like, academic excellence, right?” said Carlos Georges, a graduate student at Columbia Engineering.

As a conference in the NCAA Division I Football Championship Subdivision, the Ivy League built an operation of its own: a 10-game regular season, no athletic scholarships, and no playoffs until this year. The Ivy League is now able to participate in postseason games starting this season. A month later, the Ivy League decided to opt out of the NCAA antitrust settlement that allows direct compensation from schools to athletes, retaining the emphasis on the “student” part in student-athlete.

Columbia students often focus on more than academics, and many share the impression that career preparation is a key priority here. Across three undergraduate colleges at Columbia, an average of 85% surveyed graduates are employed or pursuing graduate school, according to Columbia’s Center for Career Education.

“This is also just how Columbia is and, like, how people who go into Columbia are. You [have] got to grind, grind, grind, and get your best job,” said Aidan Hassan, a senior and sportswriter for the Columbia Spectator. “Like, you don’t care about sports. That’s not what you’re here for.”

Hassan became a writer for the Spectator in his freshman year, seeking a way to engage with both sports and campus culture. Yet, the reality was that, unlike his high school or a typical college town, he found, sports and campus culture are largely unrelated.

“It’s just a totally different environment,” he said.

Part of that difference, students said, stems from the diverse, international student body.

“Compared to schools like… Michigan… people grew up all interested in football and that’s just kind of in their blood,” said Justin Gottlieb, a junior on Columbia track and field. “Columbia, obviously, people are coming from all over the place. Football is maybe not their biggest sport, or wherever they’re coming from.” His teammate, Marc Dabby, added that schools like the University of Michigan have long-standing traditions for the “Big House,” the fond nickname for the school’s Ann Arbor football stadium, and chatting football with professors that students here don’t necessarily share.

A May 2025 New York Times report highlighted that Columbia has the highest percentage of international student enrollment, at 40% of its entire student body from both undergraduate and graduate levels.

Leyla Zhaksybek, an international student at Columbia’s School of General Studies, said she’s more interested in the football game as an experience, as a part of the school spirit that unifies students. The city itself, with its Broadway shows, concerts, and foodie and nightlife scenes, also adds to the culture, adding another layer to how students engage in campus sports.

“I feel like in a lot of other schools, since everyone’s in school and like, what else is there to do but go to a football game?” said Zhaksybek. “I feel like here, there are so many other options to do something else besides that. And I think that definitely makes it harder.”

People often associate college football atmosphere with “big-time schools that are in the SEC (Southeastern Conference), ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference), or Big Ten,” said Mike Kowalsky, the associate athletics director for communications and public relations at Columbia Athletics. He noted how Columbia’s game day experience can differ from the most elite subdivisions of Division I.

Meanwhile, with so many professional teams in New York, from the Knicks to the Rangers to the Liberty, it’s just a different market, he said, and attention can be drawn away from college football.

Transportation in the city makes another “tough selling point” for people to attend these games, with the stadium being almost a hundred blocks north of the Columbia campus, said Dabby. The athletics department offers free shuttle buses running from 116th and Broadway to Baker Athletics Complex in loops, before and after games, a schedule that Dabby admitted he hasn’t quite figured out.

Owing to accessibility, Gottlieb said he attended more basketball games than football games last year, since the Dodge Fitness Center is on campus and easy to stop by. And the times he watched Columbia football, it was and will be for homecoming.

“I kind of forgot this was homecoming season,” said Asher Seet, a junior at Columbia University. “I’m like, ‘there’s no nothing.’” The only time he recalls football being in a conversation was when a friend mentioned attending the homecoming game.

The homecoming game against the Penn Quakers on Oct. 18 marked their first Ivy League home game and their largest turnout of the season, with 12,704 fans in attendance. Attendance was strong across the board, involving students, alumni, trustees, and even CEO and Columbia alumnus Robert Kraft, said Shomari Adisa, director of ticketing operations. Homecoming is always the “bread and butter,” the biggest game of the year, when attendance is set to double for top football schools, and Columbia is no exception.

But it’s not easy to draw a comparison with those schools, he said.

“Their expectations for a game day are much higher than ours on a consistent basis because that’s typically their focus,” Adisa said.

Adisa said the department regularly engages participation from local communities, brings in vendors, and offers incentives to boost attendance. At the home opener, they gave away T-shirts, and at homecoming, Raising Cane’s had a stand with its own giveaways. The shuttle service ferried spectators to and from the stadium and also received compliments from attendees.

Still, Georges thinks that Columbia football’s marketing could do better.

“I think they should be more preppy about it if they want people to attend games,” Georges said.

Hassan said that getting Columbia students to care about sports would take a decade, a “massive, colossal cultural shift,” along with more investment in athletics.

Last year, led by the new head coach Jon Poppe, the Lions won the Ivy League championship title “for the first time since the Kennedy administration,” he said.

But Columbia is still battling the history of being an unsuccessful football program, said Kowalsky. The program works with talented athletes and builds good relationships across the university, progressing and demonstrating the importance of “being great academically and great athletically.” Things won’t happen overnight, he said, but they are going in the right direction.

“Taking a step back and looking at the student body. And it’s pretty divided right now…You had the protests,” Dabby said. “Our campus is shut down too, and the gates aren’t even open.”

“So, if you were to look at all factors, including just general atmosphere [of] like Columbia, that is probably not a great thing to have. We already are kind of lacking in a community to begin with.”

Columbia University, with a record of 1-8, will play its final scheduled football game on Nov. 22.