The FOIAball Fairweather Fan Index

Hello and welcome to FOIAball. We’re dropping our big free feature today instead of Thursday because I once again had the pleasure of joining Ryan Nanni on Phantom Island.

We talked about the long history of NCAA attendance laws and used statistics to badmouth a bunch of different programs. Much like I’m gonna do in this newsletter. 

You can give it a listen here, either before you read this article or after you finish! The choice is entirely yours!

One thing you don’t have a choice about: Being asked right now to upgrade to a paid subscription to FOIAball. 

A couple bucks a month from you makes a big difference to me.

When Bill Belichick made his UNC coaching debut, he did so at a sold-out Kenan Stadium, with an announced attendance of 50,500 fans. 

Seven weeks later, Belichick’s Tar Heels took the field against UVA. But the hype was gone. The team had already lost four games, and its on-field play was the least concerning issue.

Still, they played in front of another sold-out crowd, another announced attendance of 50,500. At least, that was what the scoresheet said. Anyone watching could see a stark difference between Week One and the stands that Saturday afternoon. 

But can we know just how many fans didn’t show up that day? Yes, we can. 

You probably know that teams don’t use actual entry data for their attendance figures. Instead, programs base their numbers on tickets distributed, which include sales, partnerships, and freebies.

UNC sold out every game before the season started. So if a Raleigh-based law firm scooped up 20 season tickets and handed them to clients who didn’t care about Gio Lopez vs. Chandler Morris, those count the same as 20 dedicated alumni who actually showed up. 

Schools, though, know the final totals. They have data for every ticket scanned at entry. Which FOIAball obtained through records requests from over 40 programs. 

As you could see on TV, as UNC struggled, attendance dropped. Against the Cavaliers, the stadium was just barely half full, with fewer than 27,000 people, including students, scanned in that day.

We’ll be honest, we are not the first publication to do a story about this. That’s because membership in college football’s top tier was previously tied to attendance metrics. There’s a great podcast by the fine folks at Phantom Island, out today, that discusses just that.

In 2019, The Athletic’s Chris Vannini ran a fun piece on how schools goosed their numbers to qualify. In 2023, as those rules were set to be removed, the Wall Street Journal’s Rachel Bachman looked at the difference between attendance figures and gate take.

So we wanted to do something else.

Because here’s the thing about those big publications, and why you should pay for independent media. They can’t be mean just for fun. 

Instead, for the 2025 data we collected, we looked at some of the biggest drop-offs from game to game, to see what fans couldn’t be bothered to show up. 

Call it the FOIAball Fairweather Fan Index. 

Do not, however, call this scientifically rigorous. 

That’s because: 1. We’re just playing around here, and 2. Schools take a lot of issues with scanned ticket data. 

College football teams are really good at sellouts. According to data tabulated by d1Ticker, UNC was one of 30 schools that had 100% attendance for every single home game this year.

Scratch that. UNC was one of 10 teams that reported 100% attendance at every home game. Twenty other teams had attendance figures greater than their stadium’s listed capacity, which should be impossible. Or, at least, a truly flagrant violation of state and local fire codes. 

It’s a great figure to tout. It also is a disservice to cite it. At a time when average fans feel squeezed, teams can use these figures to justify any ticket price hike. Even if the ones who can afford to pay don’t use them.

Which probably explains why, when we got this data, schools were quick to give lots of caveats. 

They warned that sometimes scanners malfunctioned. They said that to speed up entry, gate attendees sometimes waived people in. They said some student tickets were counted by hand. 

One school straight up wouldn’t provide its figures, arguing the data couldn’t be fairly analyzed because it did not count the team’s band and cheerleaders.

In the data set, we have notes appended to each school that mentioned any concern.

Which makes it a good time to remind everyone, these numbers are estimates. And we’re just having fun. 

Back to UNC. In July, the school boasted that every 2025 home game was sold out. But the scanned totals show how attendance fluctuates across a tumultuous season. 

In the opener against TCU, the scanned total was 39,411, about 78% of the stadium's capacity. Next week, the Tar Heels played a much less exciting opponent, Richmond, and attendance fell by 8,000 people, a 19% drop.

The numbers ticked up when Clemson came to Chapel Hill after the team’s bye. But two weeks later, back home at 2-4 against UVA, things hit a nadir. Just 26,986 were scanned in. The following game, against Stanford, was the school’s second-lowest total, before a rivalry game against Duke brought the numbers up a bit.

But, enthusiasm for Belichick aside, UNC wasn’t expected to compete in 2025. What about a contender, a long-time stalwart that recently won titles? Would fans really abandon it as it slogged through a sad season?

Clemson started the season ranked No. 4 in the AP preseason poll. And they kicked off with a huge game against LSU. Reported attendance that night was 81,500, a Memorial Stadium sellout. About 70,900, though, actually came through.

That was the high point of the season, both on the field and at the gate. 

A week after notching its fourth loss of the season, Clemson hosted Duke. That was the Tigers' least-attended game of the year, with 24,000 fewer fans coming through than Week One. 

In only one other game did Clemson crack 60,000. That was Nov. 8 against FSU, still 9,900 scans short of its biggest draw.

But Clemson’s season went off the rails hard. Surely fans don’t dip out when one game goes awry for a powerhouse.

The Oregon Ducks had the most safety code-violatin’ stadium in the country. Autzen Stadium has an official capacity of 54,000, but an average reported attendance of 58,582. 

That’s because it doesn’t count certain sales like standing room only tickets. But regardless of numbers, they pack in fans. Or do they?

On Oct. 11, the Ducks hosted the Indiana Hoosiers, an early-season heavyweight clash of undefeated teams. The game’s reported attendance was 59,625, pretty close to the stadium’s physical maximum.

But the scanned number was much lower, at 50,282. 

The team lost to the Hoosiers, 30-20. The next home game, after a road romp over Rutgers, was against a 2-5 Wisconsin team. Oregon claimed a drop of just 685 attendees. The scans show a loss of 7,468 fans. Was it a dreary, rainy day? Yes. Is that my problem? No.

Big losses that derail a season can also kill the urge to attend. Especially when paired with a dismal opponent the next week. 

Tennessee saw its biggest crowd of the season at its Nov. 1 game against Oklahoma, a Dark Mode evening where a win would have kept its CFP hopes alive. 

The next week, after losing to the Sooners, 12,000 fewer people came to see the Vols play New Mexico State. The school, of course, still reported it as a sell-out crowd. 

But what’s something we can do with all this to make absurd, blanket statements about entire fan bases? This data was overwhelming, incomplete, and even a statistician I sent it to kinda shrugged. But I think I settled on something. 

Teams that saw a significant drop-off in their second home game. Anyone can be excited for the first kickoff of the year. Are your fans capable of holding onto that enthusiasm until the very next game?

Take, for instance, Texas Tech, going from its season opener vs. Arkansas Pine-Bluff to playing Kent State seven days later. Both games were reported as capacity crowds, but in Week Two, the school scanned 7,984 fewer tickets, an 18% dropoff. 

Or Nebraska. Against Akron, the team scanned in 74,804 people (but reported 86,000). The next week at Houston Christian, gate scans were down 12%. 

Is this method peer-tested? No. Did I account for any variables, like the violent thunderstorms that plagued the first Saturday of September? No. I’m not the one who decided to stay home. Did I put it in a spreadsheet? You betcha.

Do you want to know what fan bases are officially SOFT?

Cincinnati, Clemson, Colorado, Fresno State, Georgia Southern, Hawaii, JMU, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon State, Rutgers, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Toledo, UMass, UNC, UTEP.

The following teams’ second home game numbers went up. They, therefore, are TOP-TIER fan bases.

Cal, ECU, Houston, Iowa, Iowa State, Kent State, Kentucky, Louisville, Maryland, North Texas, Northern Illinois, Oregon, Southern Miss, Tennessee, Utah State, Washington, Wisconsin, WVU, Wyoming.

“WTH!,” you say. “Tennessee got to play Georgia for its second home game, and Iowa State got Iowa. That’s not fair, we went from Cal to Fresno.”

Don’t care. Illinois had Western Illinois and then Western Michigan. Its numbers went up. Iowa had Albany, then UMass. Its numbers went up, too.

Which makes them good, passionate fan bases. If you have an issue, you can meet me in the comments. For this post, I have limited it to paid subscribers.

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We’ll see you tomorrow!

Stadium seats via Terry Kearny/Flickr (Public Domain)