(09-15-2022 11:10 AM)jp102586 Wrote:  Universities routinely throw in free tickets for corporate sponsors which are used to count towards the total attendance. Used to work for a company in Toledo that sponsored Rocket football and basically everyone at the office had access to a free ticket if they wanted to go.

Exactly. When it first started, attendance was one of a list of things, each of them qualified schools as I-A. When I-AA was established, there was hope that more conferences would go that route than ending up doing so. So the NCAA change and "or" to an "and" and required meeting all of the tests.

But it turned out that power conferences included schools that couldn't guarantee hitting the attendance target year in and year out, so in the end they relented and let schools decide whether to report turnstile counts or tickets sold. The power conference "small stadium" schools in the power conferences could make sure to "sell" enough tickets through sponsors to be fine.

Sure, that meant that conferences like the MAC could also take advantage of that to beat back the effort to force the MAC to go down to I-AA (later renamed FCS), but the power conferences of the day didn't want to downgrade the MAC schools badly enough to kick out any of their own schools in the process.

In practice, the rule has become a minimum stadium size rule, since you can't count a ticket sold when you cannot show where a person holding that ticket can go to watch the game.