A lot, apparently.

As attendance at college football games and Major League Soccer (MLS) matches trend in opposite directions (spoiler: soccer is on the way up), college football programs from University of Florida to Oklahoma State are turning to MLS teams and Sporting Innovations, a sports technology firm, for new ideas.

Ben Cohen of the Wall Street Journal has the story:

Why College Football Is Studying Major League Soccer

No sports fans are as maniacal as the people who pack Southeastern Conference football stadiums on Saturdays. To call college football their religion may be generous to those who believe in a supreme being.

But not even Southern football fans are sure things to show up to games any more—and their increasingly unpredictable behavior has sent officials from SEC athletic departments searching for ways to win them back.

Their common destination this off-season was an unlikely location in Big 12 country. But they weren’t scouting other colleges. They were chasing an experience so foreign that it doesn’t currently exist in the Southeast: a Major League Soccer game.

In May, a group from Florida’s athletic department became one of hundreds of sports teams to visit Sporting Kansas City, the reigning MLS champion, and Sporting Innovations, the team’s spinoff consulting firm focused on fan engagement and technology.

The trip wasn’t as unorthodox as it sounds. As colleges seek out ways to enhance their stadiums and entice a generation of absentee fans, they are looking at MLS teams as models, even though the average MLS crowd is about a quarter of the 75,674 that the SEC averaged last season, the top figure in college football.

“The word is out,” said Portland Timbers president of business operations Mike Golub, “that it’s a special game experience.”