The fans who went missing: Why scanned ticket numbers matter in CFB

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Today, we’re hearing from Greg Chick, the founder and editor-in-chief of NILnomics, who’s got at on to say about a metric you may not have thought much about: scanned ticket numbers. He’s using data from David Covucci of FOIABall; David’s newsletter chronicles his adventures through the public-records system and the insights hiding at the end of them, and his public-records digging made this analysis possible. Here goes:

by Greg Chick

David Covucci contributed to this report

Have you ever watched a college football game on TV and been struck when the broadcast stops to announce the attendance? The number sounds impressive. Then you look at the screen, see swaths of empty seats, and think, that can’t be right.

You’re not wrong. The announced figure is a count of tickets distributed: season and single-game tickets sold, plus student allotments and complimentary tickets for advertisers, sponsors, recruits and the visiting band. It is not a count of people. 

The number that reflects bodies in the building is scanned attendance: tickets read at the turnstiles as fans walk in. Schools can hand out as many tickets as they like to pad the announced figure, but a distributed ticket and an occupied seat are not the same thing — and the difference, it turns out, is enormous.

It makes sense, then, that scanned totals are hard to come by. But David Covucci of FOIABall recently managed to pry loose data from 55 public FBS schools, and he asked me to dig in. 

A few caveats before we start, because honest data deserves honest framing. Several athletic departments wanted it known that student tickets often aren’t scanned, which can understate the true crowd. Others flagged one-off issues: weather knocking scanners offline, third-party contractors handling ticketing in ways that muddy the counts and a September Clemson–Troy game suspended in the first quarter for lightning. Utah State, notably, added student tickets to its scanned totals without scanning them, so its numbers run the opposite direction. Also, plenty of schools simply didn’t respond to David’s requests — so don’t read the absence of a program from the data as a statement about that program.

Let’s start simple. For each school, I computed the game-level gap — the difference between reported attendance and scanned, divided by reported — and averaged it across the home slate. That figure answers a blunt question: Of all the tickets that went out the door, what share never made it through one? Across all 353 games in the data set, the answer was 28.4 percent. Announced attendance totaled 15.4 million; scanners counted 11.0 million. 

Here’s how the schools stack up:

The most inflated programs include a wall of Group of 6 names led by Toledo, which announced roughly three fans for every one who came. And the least inflated include Michigan, Ohio State and the rest of the Big Ten and SEC heavyweights, whose announced numbers land within striking distance of scans.

A few results cut against type. Maryland and Cincinnati look worse than a Power 4 program should (both near 39 percent), while Louisville (22 percent) and James Madison (31 percent) come off better than their profiles would suggest.

Roll the schools up into leagues, and the pattern snaps into a clean resource gradient: