My AJC colleague Bill King explored this issue in June in his  Junkyard Blawg, but the Wall Street Journal looks at it today. Why are fewer students in SEC schools, including the University of Georgia, attending football games?

Could it be they’re using their Saturday afternoons to study?

Unfortunately, that is not the likely cause of the drop in student attendance.

Among the reasons: It’s more comfortable to watch the game in a bar or your own living room. As former UGA President Michael Adams told the WSJ: "Big-screen TVs close to your own refrigerator are pretty compelling."

Plus, this highly wired generation also doesn’t like the lack of connectivity at football stadiums.

The Wall Street Journal reports: (This is an excerpt. Please read the full piece before commenting.)

Declining student attendance is an illness that has been spreading for years nationwide. But now it has hit the Southeastern Conference, home to college football's best teams and supposedly its most fervent fans, giving athletics officials reason to fret about future ticket sales and fundraising. As it turns out, Georgia students left empty 39% of their designated sections of Sanford Stadium over the last four seasons, according to school records of student-ticket scans. Despite their allocation of about 18,000 seats, the number of students at games between 2009 and 2012 never exceeded 15,000.

The inscrutable behavior of 18-to-22-year-olds is actually understandable in this case: For students today, there are more reasons than ever to skip the game. The cellular reception at the stadium is bad. The nonconference schedules these days are worse. And the high-definition broadcast at home (or at the frat house, the bar or wherever) is gorgeous. The result is students are focusing on the few marquee games—like Saturday's matchup of No. 6 LSU and No. 9 Georgia—at the expense of others.

To study this shift in behavior, the SEC recently hired Now What, a New York market-research firm that will spend this season traveling to SEC stadiums, visiting fans watching at home to gather their opinions before presenting its findings after the regular season. "We can't afford to lose a generation," said Mississippi State athletic director Scott Stricklin, a member of the SEC's committee on the game-day experience.

This worrisome dynamic was evident last Saturday, when Georgia hosted North Texas on a drizzly afternoon and one tailgating troupe near Sanford Stadium kept dry underneath tents. Lounging in lawn chairs, with a makeshift bar to their right and their buffet and beer-pong tables behind them, students who said they had tickets to the game being played across the street instead were glued to two flat-screen TVs. "There are a ton of people who prefer this," said Sam Little, a junior at Georgia. "They can actually watch the game instead of deal with the crazy atmosphere."

Those students were far enough from the stadium to use their smartphones—which, they gripe, is virtually impossible inside. As the service is right now, many stadiums are such dead zones that "you can't text, Instagram or tweet," said Georgia senior Kim Baltenberger.