Major college football home attendance in 2014 dipped to its lowest average in 14 years as many schools continue to struggle to fill seats.

Football Bowl Subdivision crowds for home games averaged 43,483 fans per game, down 4 percent from 2013 and the lowest since 42,631 in 2000, according to a CBSSports.com analysis of NCAA attendance data. This marked the sixth straight season crowds were below 46,000 since they peaked at 46,456 in 2008.

Read the rest here:
http://www.cbssports.com/collegefootball...n-14-years

This is a small thing, but something worth considering. The new 1A teams that have come up in the past few years, drag down the average attendance.

(12-15-2014 03:25 PM)adcorbett Wrote:  This is a small thing, but something worth considering. The new 1A teams that have come up in the past few years, drag down the average attendance.

Actually, this is a big thing.

13 of the 127 schools in FBS have joined in the last 14 years. If the new schools averaged 20,000, this would lower the overall average by 5.85%*.

So by their own numbers, same-school attendance is actually up over 6% in the last 14 years despite huge increases in ticket prices and television coverage (i.e., the option to watch from home). That's pretty good.


* the math:
114 * 43,833 = 4,957,062
13 * 20,000 = 260,000
260,000 + 4,957,062 = 5,217,062
5,217,062 / 127 = 41,079
43,833 / 41,079 = 1.0585

I think one thing that is interesting is these numbers don't count the neutral site games. Like week 1 this year there were 6 neutral site games- and 5 drew over 50k with 2 of the games over 70k. Given how the neutral site games are becoming so much of a larger factor- to not be counting these in the numbers is comical.

(12-15-2014 03:25 PM)adcorbett Wrote:  This is a small thing, but something worth considering. The new 1A teams that have come up in the past few years, drag down the average attendance.

"This was the first year the NCAA counted attendance from six new FBS schools: Georgia Southern, Old Dominion, Charlotte, Appalachian State, Georgia State and Texas San Antonio. But even when removing those teams from the calculation, the average for returning FBS schools (44,544) would be the lowest since 2002."

Price gouging season ticket holders doesn't help.

$2000 mandatory "donation"
$1800 to buy the right to buy tickets
$1100 to buy the tickets
$~500 to park

That isn't that out of the ordinary.

Maybe % of capacity would be a better indicator?

Well here are the numbers. From last year to this year, there were 4 teams added who averaged 18,500 per team. But those have been accounted for in the numbers.

However if I remove all 19 teams who have joined FBS since 1997, none of whom are near the average, with only USF over even 30,000, it makes a difference. Using the raw numbers, the 129 teams combined to draw 5,451,048 fans for an average of 42,256 (the numbers above are modified to remove a few teams). The 19 in question drew 369,845, for an average of 18,492. Remove those teams and you get a new average of 46,193, or a 9.3% increase.

Again doesn't really apply to the comparison above, but sort of puts the 2008 numbers in perspective. Note that removing all schools added after 2008 would adjust the numbers to 44,478 for this year.

(12-15-2014 04:03 PM)stever20 Wrote:  I think one thing that is interesting is these numbers don't count the neutral site games. Like week 1 this year there were 6 neutral site games- and 5 drew over 50k with 2 of the games over 70k. Given how the neutral site games are becoming so much of a larger factor- to not be counting these in the numbers is comical.

The neutral-site games hurt home attendance. The quality of the home schedule takes a hit when name teams play at Jerryworld or Atlanta and don't play each other at home sites.

If Florida or Michigan plays 2 games against "name" opponents at neutral sites instead of playing a home/home with a name opponent, then their home attendance average is potentially less, because the home opponent they schedule instead of that name opponent is going to be a team that doesn't make Florida or Michigan fans want to run out and buy tickets.

(12-15-2014 04:03 PM)stever20 Wrote:  I think one thing that is interesting is these numbers don't count the neutral site games. Like week 1 this year there were 6 neutral site games- and 5 drew over 50k with 2 of the games over 70k. Given how the neutral site games are becoming so much of a larger factor- to not be counting these in the numbers is comical.

It really doesn't change the totals much. Using the five kickoff games, they averaged 57,979 in five games (doesn't include the couple of ins season neutral site games like UF/UGA or Tech/Baylor). When I average it in, it averaged 120 more people per game. The better complaint might be if they just used the averages per game, like above, it doesn't account for the fact that the teams who average the most, have the most games. I only accounted for averages in my numbers, since I didn't have the totals. But that is where the numbers can change.

A whole lot of fudging going on here.

Miami (FL) claiming over 52K? Bahahahahahaha. No flipping way did they have even half that number in the stands.

Eastern Michigan got themselves over the FBS Mendoza line at 15,025. Ditto. Their Pepsi deal coming through again to keep them over the audit level. A 271% increase for them? Not buying it in terms of actual people at games.

Purdue down 28% for the largest drop in the P5.

<<Figures represent the announced crowd totals schools reported to the NCAA and not necessarily actual attendance.>>

I have to laugh at attendance comparisons. If the NCAA attendance data is what each school announces, per statement... I don't see how anyone can ever tell if attendance is up or down. There is no standard for announced attendance, and a whole lot of fudging going on.

Attendance for live sporting events is down across the board. It's why a lot of places are now focusing on amenities and less on # of seats whether it's college stadiums, NFL stadiums, NBA and college arenas, NASCAR tracks, ect. The goal now and moving forward won't necessarily be to simply get people through the gates, but to offer a unique experience that makes going to the event vs. watching live on TV worth while for those that DO go. With all the camera work and networks and HDTVs, it's going to be harder and harder to get people to come to games and sit in the weather. Hell, they're just now starting to toy with the idea of releasing movies on PPV the same day they're released in theatres for this very reason...

(12-15-2014 04:59 PM)CommuterBob Wrote:  A whole lot of fudging going on here.

Miami (FL) claiming over 52K? Bahahahahahaha. No flipping way did they have even half that number in the stands.

Eastern Michigan got themselves over the FBS Mendoza line at 15,025. Ditto. Their Pepsi deal coming through again to keep them over the audit level. A 271% increase for them? Not buying it in terms of actual people at games.

Purdue down 28% for the largest drop in the P5.

True but since this is a comparison topic, it's not like the years being compared to didn't do the same thing.

when you systemically stack the playing field to make a sports league as blatantly rigged and unfair as FBS, when most of the schools can't even get a chance to play for a championship even if they win every game on their schedule, when a TV network and sports media talking heads get to decide which teams are worthy and which aren't, you end up with a sports league that is purposefully uncompetitive which makes it less exciting to want to watch live.

They really need to do something about the length of games. These 4 hour marathons are getting out of hand. Too much down time. Fans get bored. Speed up the game.

I think it may be time to try an experiment. Start with Tier3 games only. For 1 TV timeout per quarter for the first 3 quarters, have live action continue while they show 3 minutes of commercials on tv. Then when they come back from break, they quickly catch up by showing all the plays missed during those 3 minutes. This would make the viewing experience better both at home and in the stadium.

Well NFL games are much shorter. They could adopt NFL timing rules.

(12-15-2014 04:59 PM)CommuterBob Wrote:  A whole lot of fudging going on here.

Miami (FL) claiming over 52K? Bahahahahahaha. No flipping way did they have even half that number in the stands.

Eastern Michigan got themselves over the FBS Mendoza line at 15,025. Ditto. Their Pepsi deal coming through again to keep them over the audit level. A 271% increase for them? Not buying it in terms of actual people at games.

Purdue down 28% for the largest drop in the P5.

Yep. Same thing with Pitt - their numbers in the stand are nowhere near the numbers being reported.

I've been to about 10 Purdue games over the past 3-4 years. A 28% drop from last year is extremely generous. I'd say a 40-60% drop is more accurate, and they were fudging last year's numbers to begin with.

Say what you will about Ohio State and Cincinnati, but in my experience they've actually reported accurate numbers in the past decade (although UC's numbers from the late 90s/early 00s were too high).

FBS is going to have to look at the live game experience. Too many commercial breaks and too much down time at games. Cable networks make most of their money from carriage fees. If Im a conference (especially a non-P5 conference) with a cable network contract, I cut commercial breaks in half and limit the duration to one minute as part of my next contract negotiation. The G5 gets little from TV money and frankly, ad sales are not that big a component on sales. Use 15 second bugs to run ads and make the in game experience better by reducing the down time. Raising attendance is a better way to increase revenue that hoping for better media contracts.

I have heard that a play is run about every 45 seconds during a game. If they ran plays during a 3 minute tv timeout, that works out to about 3 or 4 plays missed during commercials. A small price to pay to speed up the game, especially since they can show the missed plays using replays. Or just show the missed plays quickly when they come back. They could catch up to live action in about a minute.