For KU AD Travis Goff, attendance aspirations for Arrowhead Stadium games are significant

LAWRENCE — As Kansas football opened fall camp earlier this week, head coach Lance Leipold’s focus, understandably, centered on his team.

In the weeks and months ahead this year, the Jayhawks will play their home games away from Lawrence as renovations progress with their home stadium. It’s led for a push to have as much of a home-field advantage at Children’s Mercy Park (Kansas City, Kansas) and Arrowhead Stadium (Kansas City, Missouri) as possible. And asked about ways his optimism has been reinforced, Leipold noted he hasn’t been spending much time on that at the moment.

Leipold pointed at his program, and a desire to play well early so the season starts well. He pointed to Big 12 Conference media days in July in Las Vegas and hopes fans embrace how differently Kansas is being viewed this year compared to how it has been in the recent past. The Jayhawks are Big 12 title contenders after a remarkable turnaround since the start of Leipold’s rebuild in 2021.

But just before the start of fall camp, Travis Goff didn’t hold back on setting high aspirations for that fan support. Goff, KU’s director of athletics, especially did so with Arrowhead Stadium — which houses the National Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs. Multiple reports from 2023 set that venue’s capacity at a bit more than 76,000, about 30,000 more than KU’s own college home pre-renovation, and Goff wants to meet that capacity as much as possible.

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“At the end of the day, it’s a delicate dance,” Goff said as he discussed the Arrowhead Stadium games. “We want an incredible home-field advantage and we want to do everything possible to maximize that. And we want to maximize student attendance. And then we certainly want to expose new people to Kansas football. We’ll have a couple visiting fan bases that will have something to say about that, and that’s tremendous and we’ll appreciate their investment. But, ultimately, it is about maximizing Jayhawk support in that venue.”

Arrowhead Stadium will be home to Kansas for four Big 12 games against TCU (Sept. 28), Houston (Oct. 19), Iowa State (Nov. 9) and Colorado (Nov. 23). Those follow the Jayhawks’ two non-conference home games against Lindenwood (Aug. 29) and UNLV (Sept. 13), which will be played at Children’s Mercy Park — home to the Major League Soccer organization Sporting Kansas City.

Goff described the reception from fans about tickets for the games at Children’s Mercy Park and Arrowhead Stadium as really, really strong. Several ticket strategies are in line to be used by the time the games take place. The recently announced student transportation plan is part of the effort to maximize student attendance as much as possible.

As Leipold seemed to allude to, early-season success — both at home and away — could have a significant effect on what the home crowds look like throughout the season. But Kansas is also coming off of back-to-back bowl appearances for the first time in more than a decade, and a bowl win for the first time in more than a decade. There are numerous factors that, if they are able to be capitalized on, can help the Jayhawks have the type of attendance at Arrowhead Stadium that Goff is aiming for.

“We know somebody had maybe made some assumption or suggestion, ‘Hey, let’s just play down there with the lower bowl and shut down the upper,’” Goff said about the Arrowhead Stadium games. “No, our aspirations are far greater than that. We want that upper bowl feeling, looking, the part of what this program deserves.”

Jordan Guskey covers University of Kansas Athletics at The Topeka Capital-Journal. He is the National Sports Media Association’s sportswriter of the year for the state of Kansas for 2022. Contact him at jmguskey@gannett.com or on Twitter at @JordanGuskey.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: For KU AD Travis Goff, attendance aspirations for Arrowhead Stadium games are significant