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In Depth Look at College Football Attendance

James Snook-USA TODAY Sports

Y'all ready for some charts and graphs?

If not, that's cool. You can go back to watching "Undisputed" on Fox Sports if you want.

Oh Skip.... so now to the point!

We haven't heard as much about it this off season, but in the past few years (especially last season) there's been a lot of talk in Boise about game attendance; What's going on, why is it down, how to improve it, and a bunch of other stuff. Even though I haven't seen anything about this year I thought it would be interesting to see if there's any factors that lead to attendance and try to find any correlation. I looked at 47 FBS teams and collected data I thought would impact in-game attendance. I looked at the ticket cost, total living alumni from the schools, the population of the area the school is in, if they had decent kick-off times, quality of opponents, and final ranking. All of this was for the 2017 season. I put it all into a fancy program I used in a stats class last semester (Rstudio) to do all the math for me, cause that's a lot of math I don't want to do.

For cost I did the average cost of a normal ticket for each game (a lot of schools charge booster fees, but those are nearly the same for most schools so I didn't include those). Living alumni total was actually the hardest to find. Some schools brag about how many people went there and others keep it a secret that can only be found by going through a bunch of historical clues like in "National Treasure". The population is just the total of the metropolitan area the school is in. I considered a decent kickoff time before 8 pm local time or not on a weekday, since most people are okay with a game ending around 11 on a weekend and weekday games suck for a number of reasons. I considered an opponent a "qood matchup" if they were ranked, had 10 wins, or a rival team that was bowl eligible (even though Nevada is a rival for Boise, I wouldn't count that as a game people wanted to go to because Nevada sucked. If they were at least a decent team more people would have wanted to go). Final rankings came from Athlon Sports.

Also, for attendance it's difficult to compare total numbers since some stadiums are bigger than others, like how Michigan can hold over 100,000 people and Boise's capacity is about 36,000. The average attendance I included is an average percentage of stadium capacity filled for each game.

First off, Boise didn't have an attendance problem last year. Yes, you read that right. The average FBS schools' attendance from 2016 to 2017 dropped by an average of nearly 1,000 people per game. Last season Boise averaged 85% capacity, which isn't great but not bad. Schools that DO have attendance problems are schools like Northern Illinois, who have 15,000 less people going to games than from a few years ago. Or USF, who despite literally giving away tickets for free struggled to get more than half their stadium filled (averaged 48% capacity per game). Boise could be doing better, but it's far from a problem.

Now to some graphs! These are some plots of all those factors and how they relate to attendance.

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*before.8 is games played at prime time and good.matchup is a quality opponent. Both are percentages since not every team played the same number of home games. Also, I gave them weird names because the program I used is weird and wouldn't let me use better titles.

Most of that doesn't say much. Alumni and population don't give much to analyze. No school had more than two home games during the week or after 8 pm, so we can't conclude anything from that. Many people thought cost was a reason for it but it's actually a positive relationship between cost and attendance, meaning the higher the cost the higher the attendance. That's a good case of correlation not equaling causation, because no one thinks "I refuse to pay anything less than $40. Wait, it's $50? Hot dog, I'm going!". That's stupid. It's more economic really. I found that the demand for game tickets is pretty inelastic, meaning you can change the price significantly without seeing a major change in demand. So, those teams with a high cost charge more because they can without losing significant sales. Of the teams I looked at the 11 schools with the most expensive tickets all averaged at least 98% stadium capacity per game while the bottom 11 average under 70%.

The plots that DO show some correlation were the quality of the opponent and final ranking.

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Attendance tended to go up when schools had more, higher quality teams come to play, and also higher ranked teams also had better attendance (shows as a slight negative trend in that plot). There is a notable difference in attendance between between the teams that were above and below average for each of those categories (average rank was 43 and the average school played two solid teams at home).

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With ranking that's a 14% difference, and with schedule that's 21% difference. When those are combined to compare good teams with a good schedule against the others that difference is even bigger, at 25%

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Now what the heck does all this mean?

I had my own theories on why attendance was low before I did all this, like cost, lame kick-off times, or the lack of a hot dog shooting cannon.

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I guarantee that would boost attendance.

But after going through the data it's kind of common sense that good teams playing other good teams will draw bigger crowds. It's like how hardly anyone would go to a Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch concert, a lot of people would go see Metallica, and even more people would go to see AC/DC touring with Ozzy Osbourne.

The past few years Boise hasn't had too many good teams coming, but hardly anyone does. Only four of the schools I looked at had more than half of their games against decent teams. Schools can't control how good their schedule is (if you struggle with that concept go back to your room in your mom's basement) so there's not much you can do there. But schools that play well can still draw big crowds. Penn State and Miami (FL) each had one decent team at home and still averaged 90% capacity. Then there's the weird schools, like Appalachia State. They finished the year unranked and didn't play any team with more than seven wins at home. Their ticket costs were more than twice as much as Boise's and they sold out every game. The only logical explanation is they were giving out free crap every game, Oprah Winfrey style. Or they had that hot dog cannon.

Back to Boise, this doesn't give an easy fix for attendance, but if the quality of the team and the opponent are the best ways to boost attendance then next season could have more people coming to games. The home schedule isn't a whole lot better, but San Diego, Fresno, and even BYU will likely draw bigger crowds than any team from last year. Plus, there's more optimism about the team this year compared to the past few seasons. Most writers are predicting Boise will be better this year, which could lead to a boost in attendance.

Anyway, hope you found this informative. If you have thoughts or questions I'd love to hear them. I'll just keep waiting for football to start.

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