(05-12-2015 04:32 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(05-12-2015 03:07 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  Of course if you draw four people per game and those four are Warren Buffet and three of his friends you might be able to compete at the highest level with ease.

It's true, attendance is a very imperfect measurement of a minimum level of viability and wouldn't be anyone's first choice if we could get our hands on real, verified data about athletic department finances. But, more reliable measurements would probably be vetoed by the schools because they are much more intrusive, eg: Audited records of scholarship funding, to verify that each school funds the required minimums of football scholarships and varsity athletic scholarships. Or, setting minimum levels of football funding and athletic funding for each school and verifying them, and then requiring audited records of gross revenue, to verify whether money received from donors, ticket sales, university subsidies, etc., is real or just a fudge by the accountants.

IMO, there's a lot of smoke and mirrors around the publicly-released versions of these numbers, whether they come from athletic departments like Texas, or Texas State, or UT-Rio Grande Valley. No doubt, the real stories are in the data that we don't get to see. But, there's no chance we're ever going to get to see that real data, so we're stuck looking at things like reported football attendance or the sparse and cloudy numbers that the schools report to the federal government.

I learned many years ago (thanks to the Kansas City Star who discovered that Kansas was reporting far more than they could verify with tickets sold of turnstile count, later one of the Tampa area papers did likewise with USF in the early days) that there are two sets of attendance numbers. The ones we see on the NCAA website come from box scores and there is no standard at all how those are created. It can be anything from scanning tickets, tickets distributed, or the SID looking out the press box window and saying 73,158 looks about right.

The second set the NCAA will not release come from a report filed in February where the school has to detail how many were admitted to the game, the number of tickets sold at each price point, etc.

The problem is even the certified numbers are crooked. Learned that during my days doing consulting work in athletics. A former Sun Belt member now in CUSA was treating every donation as a ticket purchase. The booster club paid the money to the ticket office for the tickets, then the booster club "sold" the tickets back to the ticket office to get the cash back into the booster club. The donor never knew they bought a ticket all they knew is they got a tax deductible receipt. One year a new staffer did not know the system and failed to log the transactions "correctly" and they couldn't backdate it to clean it up without running afoul of NCAA rules, so they had to take their lumps and received an attendance warning letter from the NCAA.