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Big-time college football programs lie about game attendance

Gosh, and I’d alway thought NCAA athletics was the last bastion of honesty and integrity.

The story is from former Oregonian reporter Rachel Bachman, who turned her reporting on various Duck scandals into a WSJ job. Nigel Jaquiss of Willamette Week has a recap for those who don’t want to go behind the WSJ paywall:

A lot fewer people show up for college football games than colleges would like us to believe,the Wall Street Journal reported today. …

“The average count of tickets scanned at home games—the number of fans who actually show up—is about 71% of the attendance you see in a box score, according to data from the 2017 season,” Bachman writes.

The state’s two top programs, the University of Oregon Ducks and the Oregon State University Beavers, were among those who provided information to the WSJ.

The numbers: Oregon announced attendance of 388,000 for all of its 2017 home games but scanned only 304,450 tickets (that’s 78 percent of announced attendance).

Oregon State fared worse: the university announced attendance of 208,524 but scanned only 139,223 tickets (67 percent).

6 Comments

  1. DiscoDuck 09/01/2018

    Does this have any practical import whatsoever?

    • uomatters Post author | 09/01/2018

      Have you no respect for metrics, Disco?

      • DiscoDuck 09/03/2018

        Only diversity metrics. I will attend a game the very week that the UO squad achieves proportional representation of the University’s favored intersectional sets.

        (No flags of convenience, please.)

  2. Dog 09/01/2018

    Yes, this will translate into the rules for mandatory attendance when classes start this fall …

  3. honest Uncle Bernie 09/02/2018

    arf arf! Up early to catch a UOM starburst.

    Dog has it right! A lot of UO faculty would be thrilled to have 78% average attendance at their classes, especially undergrad, lower division.

    On the other hand, what does it say about Ducks football if they are no better draw than Math 111?!

  4. A duck 09/04/2018

    Next thing I know you’re going to tell me I can’t trust economists either!

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