Wait, USF is not listed in the attendance list....

[Triple B]

11 minutes ago, Mike Stuben said:

One more thing, stadiums with bench seats hide the empty look much more that stadiums with fixed seats. When I go to the Liberty Bowl with my family, 4 of us can take up 6-8 seats (yes I am fat, but that isn't what I mean). we leave a gap, set our jacket down between us, spread out to get comfortable. At Ray Jay, 4 of us take up exactly 4 seats. 

There's a lot closer example of the attendance ills that bench seating hide ...

[Mike Stuben]

10 minutes ago, Triple B said:

There's a lot closer example of the attendance ills that bench seating hide ...

Yep.

Another place that has benches is UConn. They play tonight. Big win if the Huskies can pull it off, since it is a rivalry game. 

[Triple B]

25 minutes ago, Mike Stuben said:

1. This isn't a USF problem, and it is time the Times treated it that way. I like Joey and Greg, but have always disagreed with the way they covered attendance.

I think the excuse used in recent times was that the actual figures are released by the TSA so it's "news" and should be reported. If my feeble memory serves me, those figures weren't always released but years ago they kept getting so many media requests for it, from different sources, that they just started avoiding that hassle and preemptively releasing it .... maybe someone with some clout can go to the TSA and change it back to the way it apparently is in most major markets.

[Mike Stuben]

2 minutes ago, Triple B said:

I think the excuse used in recent times was that the actual figures are released by the TSA so it's "news" and should be reported. If my feeble memory serves me, those figures weren't always released but years ago they kept getting so many media requests for it, from different sources, that they just started avoiding that hassle and preemptively releasing it .... maybe someone with some clout can go to the TSA and change it back to the way it apparently is in most major markets.

Funny story - USF has never had "turnstile" attendance numbers, since Bulls fans have never had to walk through a turnstile to enter Ray Jay/Old Tampa Stadium. Back in the old days, the "turnstile" number was an approximation based on weighing the ticket stubs. Now it is more accurate, as bar codes are scanned. 

[puc86]

9 minutes ago, Mike Stuben said:

Funny story - USF has never had "turnstile" attendance numbers, since Bulls fans have never had to walk through a turnstile to enter Ray Jay/Old Tampa Stadium. Back in the old days, the "turnstile" number was an approximation based on weighing the ticket stubs. Now it is more accurate, as bar codes are scanned. 

Technology is unfortunate, I would have wet my tickets and covered them in lead dust.

[NewEnglandBull]

49 minutes ago, Mike Stuben said:

One more thing, stadiums with bench seats hide the empty look much more that stadiums with fixed seats. When I go to the Liberty Bowl with my family, 4 of us can take up 6-8 seats (yes I am fat, but that isn't what I mean). we leave a gap, set our jacket down between us, spread out to get comfortable. At Ray Jay, 4 of us take up exactly 4 seats. 

That is an interesting point Mike. I have no thought about it but it does make sense, the gaps looked filled but that may not be the case. I think this is also the case at Uconn (they have bleachers in 90% of the stadium) every year I have been there it looks like it well attended but then they announce the attendance it is not great. 

[chapelbull]

Griping about attendance is so cliche'

[Gat-Rat Bull]

College Football’s Growing Problem: Empty Seats

Announced attendance dropped 3.2% in football’s top division last season, but schools’ ticket scans show even fewer fans in stands

By Rachel Bachman
Aug. 30, 2018 9:00 a.m. ET

When Minnesota hosted Nebraska at TCF Bank Stadium last year, the game featured charismatic new Golden Gophers coach P.J. Fleck, a home team fighting for a bowl berth and a big-name opponent. The announced attendance was 39,933—an OK crowd for a crisp November day in Minneapolis—but it didn’t tell the whole story.

Only 25,493 ticketed fans were counted at the gates, 36% lower than the announced attendance and about half of the stadium’s capacity. More than 14,000 people who bought tickets or got them free didn’t show up.

College football has an attendance problem. Average announced attendance in football’s top division dropped for the fourth consecutive year last year, declining 7.6% in four years. But schools’ internal records show that the sport’s attendance woes go far beyond that.

The average count of tickets scanned at home games—the number of fans who actually show up—is about 71% of the attendance you see in a box score, according to data from the 2017 season collected by The Wall Street Journal. In the Mid-American Conference, with less-prominent programs like Central Michigan and Toledo, teams’ scanned attendance numbers were 45% of announced attendance.

Notes: Teams not included in the data said they don’t keep scanned ticket counts, had invalid counts, didn’t respond or are exempt from public-records law; private schools are not required to comply

Even teams in the nation’s five richest conferences routinely record thousands fewer people passing through stadium gates than they report publicly. The no-shows reflect the challenge of filling large venues when nearly every game is on TV, and they threaten a key revenue source for college athletic departments.

“Attendance drives recruiting, attendance drives donations, merchandise sales,” said Rob Sine, who until earlier this year was president of IMG Learfield Ticket Solutions, which works with dozens of colleges. If fans don’t use their tickets, he added, “they’re more likely to not come back.”

Most schools scan and keep count of tickets used at football games. The Journal requested access to those counts under public-records law, and most public schools supplied them. Private schools aren’t subject to public-records law.

Minnesota’s gap between scanned and announced attendance could have been worse—its announced attendance doesn’t include stadium staff, marching bands or media, as many other schools do. A Minnesota spokesman said officials were unavailable to comment.

When Minnesota hosted Nebraska at TCF Bank Stadium last year, only 25,493 ticketed fans were counted at the gates, 36% lower than the announced attendance.
When Minnesota hosted Nebraska at TCF Bank Stadium last year, only 25,493 ticketed fans were counted at the gates, 36% lower than the announced attendance.

When Arkansas hosted No. 21 Auburn, scanned attendance was more than 25,000 lower than announced attendance. Overall last season, Arkansas’s scanned home attendance was 58% of its announced attendance as the Razorbacks went 4-8. Nonetheless, Reynolds Razorback Stadium is reopening Saturday after a $160 million renovation that increased capacity by about 4,000. An Arkansas spokesman declined to comment.

Florida State, which won the 2013 national title, last season had a scanned attendance that was 57% of its announced attendance. FSU spokesman Rob Wilson blamed personnel and technical issues in scanning tickets and said, “We do not believe the difference is as large as the data appears to show.”

Sine, the ticketing expert who’s now chief revenue officer at ticketing company AXS, said technology has improved to the point that scanning errors generally have a minor effect on ticket counts.

Attendance is more than a vanity issue. The NCAA requires schools to maintain a 15,000 “actual or paid” home attendance on a rolling two-year average to stay in football’s top division.

Many schools take a generous approach in compiling announced attendance, by including ushers, security guards and even the guy at the concession stand who sells you a Coke. That partly explains how Purdue’s announced attendance last season spiked 13,433 per game—the largest jump in college football. (Purdue didn’t report how many tickets it actually scanned last year, citing what a spokesman called “outdated equipment, connectivity problems and user error.”)

The NCAA accepts the announced attendance numbers schools submit “at face value,” NCAA spokesman Christopher Radford said.

Despite the rising value of TV-rights contracts, football ticket sales and donations often make up more than half of athletic-department revenues. College sports officials say many factors are incenting fans to stay home including: affordable big-screen TVs; the availability of more games on TV; ever-changing kickoff times that make it difficult to plan ahead; games that span more than four hours; traffic; and rising ticket prices.

Sagging student attendance remains a problem, even at perennial power Alabama. As part of a recently announced renovation of Bryant-Denny Stadium, the school plans to add a student terrace to create “a more interactive and social environment,” athletic director Greg Byrne said.

The renovations also will add more club and lounge areas and slightly reduce the stadium’s 101,821 capacity, part of a trend of downsizing college football stadiums.

Crowds at South Carolina have ebbed in recent years and scanned attendance made up 78% of the Gamecocks’ announced attendance last season. South Carolina held a one-day sale for the season opener against Coastal Carolina: $18.01 per ticket in honor of the school’s founding year. It sold 3,100 of those.

“If you’re in the upper deck and buying a ticket for 45 bucks, and the choice is, I can sit on my couch and have a really good view, you might do that,” said Lance Grantham, associate athletic director for ticketing and customer relations. “The [TV] product is just outrageously good.”

Public attendance numbers are part of some schools’ identity. Michigan Stadium, the “Big House,” whose 107,601 capacity is the nation’s largest, still claims a streak of 100,000-plus attendance games dating back to 1975, even though two games last year showed fewer than 80,000 scanned tickets.

A Michigan spokesman said surges of fans at gates just before kickoff sometimes prompt workers to tear tickets rather than scanning them. Michigan counts the media, stadium workers and marching bands in its announced attendance.

Nebraska boasts a sellout streak that dates to the 1962 season. But during last year’s 4-8 record, there was an average gap of more than 18,000 per game between scanned and announced attendance—mostly no-shows, a spokesman said.

Free tickets often are counted among attendance figures even if they’re never used. California, on the hook to repay the cost of a $321 million renovation for Memorial Stadium unveiled in 2012, gave away 57,108 tickets last season. That’s nearly an entire free game at the 62,467-seat stadium. About 35% of the free tickets were used, school officials say.

“Our sales and marketing team continues to look for more creative and unique ways to bring fans to Memorial Stadium,” said Joe Mulford, senior associate athletic director and chief revenue officer.

Not every school pumps up its attendance figures. Of the nearly 100 football programs that gave data to the Journal, just one used a turnstile count for its announced attendance: Navy.

Said athletic director Chet Gladchuk: “It is just the way we do business.”

—Tom McGinty contributed to this article.

[chapelbull]

This is a shocking revelation.

[BullsFanInTX]

What the chart also reveals, believe it or not, is that USF fudges numbers the LEAST, out of all AAC schools, with the exception of Navy.  Every other school fudged announced attendance more than USF (UCF was not listed among the schools reported, so we don't know how they did).  Many schools had a much, much larger discrepancy between announced attendance and actual scanned tickets than USF did...many of them AAC schools.  Memphis, for example, claimed an announced attendance of 38K, yet only had 21K show up for games, less than USF had, and a much larger discrepancy.  ECU reported 38K announced yet had only 17K attend per game.  Here are the AAC numbers.

Navy - 100% (28K announced, 28K actual)

USF - 71% (31K announced, 22K actual)

UConn - 70% (20K announced, 14K actual)

Houston - 66% (28K announced, 18K actual)

Memphis - 54% (38K announced, 21K actual)

Cincinnati - 54% (28K announced, 15K actual)

ECU - 48% (38K announced, 17K actual)