Ken Goe has the report in the Oregonian here:
— I don’t trust yesterday’s official attendance figure of 9,767. I spent part of an afternoon earlier this year hand-counting the seats at Hayward Field. I found capacity was approximately 8,500, which is far short of the University Oregon’s official figure of 10,500.
The NCAA meet drew a good crowd yesterday. But it wasn’t a capacity crowd and obviously not over-capacity.
This is the oldest story in sports business, and in many other business that involve ticket sales which don’t match actual attendance.
The typical practice is to cite the number of tickets sold (or even the number delivered into anyone’s hands, whether the tickets were sold or not) as the official attendance, which is often quite a bit higher than the “turnstile count”.
Do a web search for “attendance figures at sports events are inflated” and you’ll be treated to a wide variety of pearl-clutching exposés. The best part is that every author, including Ken Goe above, always sounds surprised and acts as if he (it’s always a he) has discovered a new continent, even though a quick news search shows that this practice has been going on for decades.
For an excellent explanation of the rational “information cascades” that motivate this sort of exaggeration, complete with a classroom experiment that has never failed me, try https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.10.4.187
The first author is a woman, guessing from the first name “Lisa”.
For a more explicit explanation of the link between cascades and popularity, see http://sites.uci.edu/dhirshle/files/2017/01/Palgrave-information-cascades-Online-version.pdf:
The gender of the perps – Michael and Fred – is obvious, but I’m too eurocentric to be sure about the gender of the first author of the paper that outs them, whose first name is “Sushil”. Although a quick google image search does provide some clues: https://www.google.com/search?q=Sushil&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiWuaXgtcPbAhW_IjQIHTEOAOoQ_AUIDSgE&biw=1224&bih=680
I wouldn’t be surprised if the official total included volunteers, family members, emergency personnel, and possibly even, coaches, trainers and athletes standing on the sidelines.
It to mention the invisible minions running concessions, cleaning, etc etc etc
Am I bad person if I simply don’t care about this at all?
Instead, I’d love to know whatever happened with the elections we just had (at UO, a month or two ago?). Have any results been announced?
I thought they’d been posted at https://senate.uoregon.edu/elections-2/, but apparently not. I’ll make sure they are up Monday.
Thanks!
There may be a simple answer here — the difference between a snapshot in time (butts in seats for an event) versus total ticket sales. People come and go, especially at Track where they have favored events, etc. So the general admission seats especially can be used twice.