Discovered an interesting website recently that I don't recall previously. Here's the LINK. It's an interactive list of 130 FBS schools showing football attendance. They present 2022 attendance compared to 2021 and a five-year average. The webpage is devoid of info for how the calculations were made and where the data come from. The source is presumably an NCAA database somewhere.
I checked the calculation for U of L with particular interest in the five-year number. That one is the average for the five years 2016-2021 inclusive but omitting the Covid year of 2020. The number was spot on with what U of L reported as tickets sold, and I assume the rest of the schools were reported similarly.
After exporting the data to Excel, I plotted the cumulative distributions for the one- and five-year rankings by percentage change in attendance. The enlarged data point on the five-year chart below is for U of L.
Percentile is a convenient stat for where you rank nationally. U of L football attendance for 2022 sits at the 14th percentile with a -15% change vs our five-year average prior. The median percentage change for this distribution--where the data cross the 50th percentile line--is +0.33%.
The data plot for year-over-year change (2022 v 2021) looks similar, and I'll post it if anyone wants to see it. The comparable numbers for U of L are a 5% decline and the 18th percentile. The one year median change in FBS attendance nationally was an increase of 6%.
We hear a lot of talk about declining attendance trends "everywhere." These numbers do not support that. It was slightly positive on a long term basis and significantly positive year over year. You can probably explain that trend as a recovery from Covid in 2020. People are showing a greater return, relatively speaking, on a short term basis.
What's also clear is that U of L attendance significantly lags FBS schools nationally. I also looked at just the ACC schools, and we're only ahead of Georgia Tech. That means we lag Boston College, Duke, and Syracuse, among others. We didn't even appear to be "bottoming out" last year; our 18% year-over-year percentile nationally is almost as low as the comparable five-year value of 14%. We're ranked badly on either basis.
Every school went through Covid, everyone has expensive beer, bad weather, and a fanbase with large HDTVs in their living rooms. I'm not looking at an overlay of won-lost records, but we went to a bowl game last year. And while Satterfield won't be missed, his .500 record over his four years is pretty close to average. However, our attendance is nowhere close to average. I'm out of explanations that make sense except for one.
Obviously we can talk about Jeff Brohm with a lot of hope. But everything and everyone else is staying the same...
I checked the calculation for U of L with particular interest in the five-year number. That one is the average for the five years 2016-2021 inclusive but omitting the Covid year of 2020. The number was spot on with what U of L reported as tickets sold, and I assume the rest of the schools were reported similarly.
After exporting the data to Excel, I plotted the cumulative distributions for the one- and five-year rankings by percentage change in attendance. The enlarged data point on the five-year chart below is for U of L.
Percentile is a convenient stat for where you rank nationally. U of L football attendance for 2022 sits at the 14th percentile with a -15% change vs our five-year average prior. The median percentage change for this distribution--where the data cross the 50th percentile line--is +0.33%.
The data plot for year-over-year change (2022 v 2021) looks similar, and I'll post it if anyone wants to see it. The comparable numbers for U of L are a 5% decline and the 18th percentile. The one year median change in FBS attendance nationally was an increase of 6%.
We hear a lot of talk about declining attendance trends "everywhere." These numbers do not support that. It was slightly positive on a long term basis and significantly positive year over year. You can probably explain that trend as a recovery from Covid in 2020. People are showing a greater return, relatively speaking, on a short term basis.
What's also clear is that U of L attendance significantly lags FBS schools nationally. I also looked at just the ACC schools, and we're only ahead of Georgia Tech. That means we lag Boston College, Duke, and Syracuse, among others. We didn't even appear to be "bottoming out" last year; our 18% year-over-year percentile nationally is almost as low as the comparable five-year value of 14%. We're ranked badly on either basis.
Every school went through Covid, everyone has expensive beer, bad weather, and a fanbase with large HDTVs in their living rooms. I'm not looking at an overlay of won-lost records, but we went to a bowl game last year. And while Satterfield won't be missed, his .500 record over his four years is pretty close to average. However, our attendance is nowhere close to average. I'm out of explanations that make sense except for one.
Obviously we can talk about Jeff Brohm with a lot of hope. But everything and everyone else is staying the same...
Last edited:
