Attendance Data. All of it.

Greetings and thank you for taking the time to read the latest issue of NILnomics. Today I’m digging into attendance data for FBS football over the last 3 years. If you read through today’s issue, you’ll know exactly which conference is filling the most seats, which school draws the most fans, and the surprising smaller schools that, though smaller, can still fill a building.

• Conference view - some conferences are filling more seats than others. What’s that look like?

• Total seats - headcount/percentage - an interesting analysis of looking at attendance through the prism of raw seats and percentage of seats filled. I’ll compare and contrast so you know how each school performs.

Pour a drink. Get comfortable. Let’s get into it.

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Conference Dominance

A few weeks ago I found where the NCAA reports attendance figures. I did some initial analysis, but now I’ve had time to dig in a bit more. I’ve got a few charts this week that give both a state of attendance in FBS football over the last 3 years as well an analysis of this weekend’s games. If liked by the community, I may keep this going - please let me know what you think!

Starting off - let’s look at attendance from a strictly conference perspective. College football’s Game of Thrones is often not as much as individual houses (ie schools) as it is kingdoms (conferences). While we’re all familiar with the hierarchy of the college sports world (SEC/B1G at the top, ACC/Big 12 in the middle, then the G6 at the bottom) it’s nice to have a dataset that can support this common perspective.

What’s great about attendance data is it can’t be faked (lol). People either show up to support the team - or don’t. Whereas TV ratings have a whole host of issues (more so now than ever) there’s a type of purity to counting people attending a game (yes I know these are measuring tickets sold, not ‘turnstile’ counts). Add to it the sheer size of some of these home stadiums, the unique culture of college athletics, and the changing financial landscape of the sport and you have a dataset ripe for meaningful analysis. And so, without further ado…

Quick Takeaways:

• The SEC barely outpaces the B1G, with 26 compared to 23 squares. The next conferences are down at 15 (Big 12) and 15 (ACC).

• My weekly plug for the MAC, home of my alma mater Bowling Green - this time at the tied with the Mountain West in number of tickets sold (3 squares).

• Of course conference realignment has alot to do with this graph - the Pac-12 at only one square is more representative of how much that conference has lost in terms of schools/fans rather than any assessment of how the two schools it has no performed.

Analyst’s Desk

All attendance data is scraped directly from the source - the NCAA. From there, for this and all the analysis of this issue I filter out neutral site games (ie games away from campus). For this analysis, I then summed attendance over the last 3 years and estimated a percentile for each conference. Note that conferences are by 2025 season conference affiliation and not back-dated.

Quick Takeaways:

• This chart repeats the pattern not only of the B1G and SEC separating from the other conferences, but by doing so by a large amount. No other conference even has a single school averaging over 100k tickets/game, whereas between these two there are 8.

• There’s something to be said about consistency. Note the disparity between Michigan (average tickets @ 110k) and Northwestern (average @ 20k). That is quite the difference between two schools in the same conference! If you look at the difference between the highest and lowest average attendance within each conference (throwing out Pac-12 with only 2 schools) then the Big 12 has the lowest percentage change of only 41% from highest to lowest average attendance. All their schools perform relatively similarly.

• Funny to see Vanderbilt at the bottom of the SEC as far as tickets sold considering the type of season they’re having.

• Only 3k tickets sold separate the Mountain West’s best school (Fresno State) and the Big 12’s worst (Cincinnati).

Analyst’s Desk

The data is the same as every other analysis this week, but I sorted the schools into their conferences (by total attendance within the conference) and sorted the conferences by the highest average attendance.

Quick Takeaways:

• The Big 12 having the highest average percentage of attendance/capacity is a fun twist. Coach Prime is drawing on average 105% of Colorado’s stadium capacity. Clearly some fun accounting is at play, but it does reflect the massive/sustained interest fans have with the team.

• Even at #2 overall, the SEC has more teams at/over 100% (7) than any other conference. B1G has 5, Big 12 4, and SBC/ACC each have 1.

• A good example of the difference between headcount/percentages is, again, Vanderbilt. While the prior chart made Vanderbilt appear vastly below the other schools in the SEC, the disparity isn’t as significant here.

  • Big 12 also has the lowest difference in average % of tickets sold compared to every other conference at a 17% difference from the best (Colorado) to the worst (West Virginia).

Analyst’s Desk

Same dataset as before, taking the percentage filled (tickets sold/capacity). I’ll note that capacity is taken from NCAA.com/Wikipedia and clearly does not correlate 1-1 on the attendance data as many schools are at greater than 100%. This could also be explained by how many tickets are being sold to suites, too.

🔉 What I’m Listening To 🔉 

I’m always on the lookout for anyone breaking down college sports and especially the business side of the industry. Here’s this week’s best listens:

• Higher Ed Athletics - an interesting interview with the new Athletics CEO of the University of South Florida. His background as the lead with the Tampa Bay Sports Authority shows one way in which college athletics is changing. Namely, in who can/will be leading athletic departments. An interesting case study.

• Trustees and Presidents - a roundtable discussion with leaders at the University of Kentucky and JMI Sports. Depending on your view, this is the most honest view of the world of college athletics or a depressing/cynical view of how commercialization will take over the space.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading this week’s issue.

This was a deeper look at the trends in attendance. As I go deeper into this space, I may start to develop actual KPIs for attendance. Keep an eye out for that. If you enjoyed this week’s issue, let me know by email. Thanks again for your time. Now finish your beverage 😀 

Until next time,

Greg Chick, PhD

Data Analyst

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