Easy on allegations of deceit if that's what you're doing. Anyone can make an honest mistake or a bad assumption. With the possible exception of
@Guardman, no one drags more raw data and linked references into this space than I do. And as I enjoy saying, when data are as bad as ours have been, nobody needs to make up anything.
I'll get to ticket scans shortly which are not what U of L reports. They may report attendance BASED ON ticket scans, but not the actual numbers. They've publicly acknowledged that.
LINK
Because of all the pushback on the notion that everything wasn't perfect on Saturday, I'm getting more precise with my statements from this point forward. And I'm changing the name of this thread as a result.
What U of L failed to do on Saturday as far as attendance was hit the stadium capacity with their announced number. Without counting physical seats, that's as close as we can determine to be fact. We may debate what the true capacity is, but it's typically reported as 61,000. There are isolated references to it being 60,800.
And this is two times (in two) that U of L has failed to do that for what will probably be the all time marquee opponent--Notre Dame--on any home schedule. To understand why that's significant, we can look at the list of recent "sellouts" at the stadium...
The linked article above from late 2018 clearly states that U of L includes unticketed attendees like stadium staff and media. So a number higher than stated capacity was never any kind of anomaly. The only game on the list above that didn't exceed capacity was lightly attended by slapd!cks thinking that Lamar & Co was going to steamroll their a$$es.
It's not an issue of unscanned tickets. The second game on the above list--Clemson in 2017--showed ticket scans of 46,224 which was 9,364 below announced attendance. For the home schedules in 2016 and 2017, one in four (24.5%) of the fans counted as in attendance did not have their tickets scanned. Also note that this analysis in late 2018 was more than a year after the new regime took over. The data it contains are as credible of a one-off analysis as we could obtain for what's going on now.
I also stated in the OP my own observation from the AE Club in which I had a bird's eye view of the east stadium seating. The toughest and probably last seats to sell are in the upper reaches of the UPS Flight Deck. Those are exactly the seats that were sparsely occupied. A couple thousand short of capacity is 10-20% of the UPS seating. Does it make sense that only people who bought tickets from U of L the last few weeks decided not to attend or never made it to their seats?
One thing that should be abundantly clear with me is I don't believe a word of what U of L administrators say. Why would I considering all of the distortions and unfulfilled promises there have been in recent years. That's in stark contrast to my support of guys like Jeff Brohm who were born and raised here, who worked hard to make this place better, and/or who are succeeding DESPITE the circumstances they're working under. I'm just damn glad that really good coaches like Brohm, Walz, and McDonnell don't care about the stuff going on around them.
Unfortunately--and for the sake of concerned fans and the other 20 head coaches on staff--I still do...
