NCAA Football Attendance press release


The NCAA announced that nearly 50.3 million people attended NCAA football games during the 2013 season. This eclipses the previous record of 49.7 million in 2011. Seven D-1 conferences set all-time attendance records, as did FBS and Division 3 as a whole.

Even more impressive, Forbes calculated that games played in SEC stadiums averaged 97% of capacity. This is higher than 12 NFL teams.

Well we sure as heck didn't. Being left behind and getting a crap home slate will do that. Did probably set a student attendance record for a thursday night game @ Dowdy. Notable mention goes to sailing into enemy territory with 10k+ and taking over their stadium as your own by half time.

Good for football though. Maybe the trend isn't as bad as it seems. Could be misleading though due to new teams and conferences adding more teams. I'd like to know the total attendance # for all teams that were FBS 5-10-15 years ago vs today. It's probably still higher because of increased enrollments and alumni bases.

We can see from these numbers that the NCAA report uses the inflated "announced attendance" figures that are often much higher than actual attendance.

We know this because of this article that contains a table comparing San Diego State's announced 2013 football home attendance versus actual turnstile count. The SDSU number in the NCAA report (look it up at the bottom of the page here) matches the "announced attendance" average of 33,224. SDSU's average by turnstile count for 2013 was only about two-thirds of that: 22,954.

Similarly, the Central Michigan number in the NCAA report for the 2011 season matches the announced attendance average of 15,291 discussed here (and in the CMU thread on this board), even though CMU's paid attendance, according to that article, averaged 4,473 for that season.

How much does this have to do with new FCS callups and FCS transition teams? Even if a new team only averages around 15,000 a game, it still adds at least 75,000 to the whole pot. With all the new teams, that adds up.