The Wall Steet Journal’s Rachel Bachman published an article today on an interesting potential attendance issue in college football: the gap between reported numbers and actual scanned tickets.
While reported attendance fell by 7.6 percent from 2016 to 2017, Bachman pointed to large percentage gaps when it came to scanned tickets. This may explain how the athletic department continued to tout the 100,000 attendance streak even through the doldrums of Brady Hoke’s final year.
Bachman, however, points to two games last year where Michigan featured a sizable reported-versus-scanned disparity.
“(Michigan) still claims a streak of 100,000-plus attendance games dating back to 1975,” she writes, “even though two games last year showed fewer than 80,000 scanned tickets.