Football Attendance for 2012

[bobbyake]

Final average attendance for the year: 15,734 (54.5% increase over last year!!!!!!)

The final home game official attendance was 19,899, which is the best over the past 2 years, the 3rd best over the past 4.

Despite Akron's poor results on the field, official attendance has been extremely good this year. A 54.5% increase is a huge positive. Go Zips!!

Please tell me you're joking, right? What was the ACTUAL attendance today?

if they can count revenue for each ticket sold, then a 54.5% increase is huge!!

[Dave in Green]

Today's attendance was the best of the year on both sides of the field. Obviously, Can't fans filled the visitor's side way more than any other visitor this year. And the home side was by far the best, probably due to the nice weather and Can't rivalry. Overall I'd say the stadium was at least 1/3rd full of actual people.

[ZachTheZip]

There's no doubt that the tickets were sold. The question is: who was buying them?

Was it local businesses? The University spending money from the general funds in a desperate attempt to meet NCAA standards? Individual fans who confused invisibility potions for beer during tailgating?

[Lee Adams]

I have been to all the home games. There is no way the ACTUAL attendance,people who actually showed, for any of them except for possibly for today is accurate. It is possible that tickets are distributed but never used. Whether they are paid for or what price is charged,who knows. Look,if they couldn't 'expand' the numbers,they would get sanctioned back to I-AA by the NCAA.

[bobbyake]

I have been to all the home games. There is no way the ACTUAL attendance,people who actually showed, for any of them except for possibly for today is accurate. It is possible that tickets are distributed but never used. Whether they are paid for or what price is charged,who knows. Look,if they couldn't 'expand' the numbers,they would get sanctioned back to I-AA by the NCAA.

they're obviously boosting the numbers for this. Not sure what the exact purpose is for the attendance requirement, especially when the NCAA allows universities to meet it through loopholes.

Is it for lying to the general public and media? To hide the truth to the local population that this program is struggling to utilize tax dollars?

I guess a 54.5% increase makes it harder for a tax payer to complain about the use of tax dollars. I doubt the University of Akron football team is in the black.

Yay! for the 54.5% increase and the 'process.'

[Dave in Green]

We've discussed the attendance issue several times, but here are the basics one more time:

Paid attendance is always more than actual attendance because there is always some percentage of no-shows for various reasons (health, weather, etc.).

Paid attendance can be legitimately increased by including hundreds or thousands of tickets as part of paid sponsorship packages, and a large percentage of these tickets tend to go unused.

There is a greater gap between paid attendance and actual attendance when a team is performing poorly because there are more no-shows for losing teams than winning teams.

Best guess is that UA is including many thousands of tickets in its paid sponsorship packages, and with the Zips' record the past two seasons, there should be no question why a large percentage of the paid-for tickets are going unused.

[ZachTheZip]

My best guess is that the University had to actually purchase the tickets from the athletics department. So the AD can report in their internal numbers that they sold 15k tickets per game, but the university as a whole is paying for it.

Corporations with many departments do this kind of creative accounting all the time, to make important departments look better than they are so that the shareholders see what the corporation wants them to see. It wouldn't surprise me if UA was doing the same thing, to please the "shareholders" like the NCAA and the general public.

[bobbyake]

Report on 2011 Official Attendance:

Actual vs official doesn't matter. a 54.5% increase is what goes in the books. Congrats to the University for such a drastic increase. Go Zips!!