It happens at every big Georgia football home game, and lately there have been a lot: The broadcast cuts to a camera in a hovering blimp and shows a Sanford Stadium that appears full. That crowd is always announced as a sellout, and given the same number: 92,746.
There’s only one hang-up: That’s not the true attendance. The real attendance figure is always at least a few thousand below that, even for the most high-profile games, and often well below 80,000.
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Georgia is on a streak of 69 consecutive sellouts, set to hit 70 on Saturday against UMass, all with announced crowds of 92,746. But that’s only tickets sold, along with an estimated number of additional personnel, arriving at the magical — but inexact — number of 92,746.
But what about the number of people who actually show up? Georgia, like most schools, keeps that figure through scanned tickets at the gate, and numbers from the previous three seasons (2015-17) were provided to The Athletic. They show that Georgia, along with most if not all other schools, has its share of no-shows, and even during last year’s run to the national championship game nearly one in 10 fans did not show up.
Some of the numbers are startling: Even when Alabama visited in 2015, and it looked like a huge crowd braving a rainy day, the number of tickets used was just below 80,000. The numbers have since increased, especially during last year’s run. The most tickets used at any game was less than 85,000, but that still compares favorably to other schools, where attendance remains a real problem.
“I think our numbers have stayed pretty consistent and they’re trending in a positive direction,” said Josh Brooks, Georgia deputy athletic director in charge of operations. “Compared to our peers, we’re pretty strong across the country.”
So it’s not the main consideration in Georgia ramping up its nonconference schedule, but it is a consideration. Georgia announced home-and-home series with Clemson and Texas on Monday, on top of a previously announced home-and-home with UCLA and neutral-site (Atlanta) games against Virginia, Oregon and Clemson.
This year’s home slate is the weakest in memory: Austin Peay, Middle Tennessee State and UMass. The gate numbers for this year have not yet been released by UGA, but there is a definite correlation in scanned attendance with the quality of opponents from 2015-17:
• Lower-tier opponents drew an average of 68,754 tickets used, including as low as 56,065 (Louisiana-Lafayette in 2016) and as high as 79,539 (Appalachian State in the 2017 season opener).
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• Power-conference opponents drew an average of 76,942 tickets used. The lowest figure was 53,541, the Kentucky game in 2015, a rainy day that followed the team’s dreary October (three losses in four games, the last being a loss to Florida). The highest figure was last year’s South Carolina game, which drew 84,833 fans.
There also are other factors, including the time of the game (the later in the day the better) and the weather. Brooks said this year’s gate attendance for the Middle Tennessee State game will be lower because the kickoff time was moved up to noon a couple days in advance.
“The way I would describe it is if you hold a party and invite 10 of your best friends, one of your friends is going to have something come up in his life that would keep them from coming, whether it would be a sickness or a travel-related issue,” Brooks said.
Georgia Home Games During 2015-17 Seasons
* Each game officially reported as a sellout (92,746)
How does Georgia arrive at the 92,746 figure? That’s broken up over two categories:
• 88,211: That’s the total number of tickets available at every game at Sanford Stadium. That includes 58,000 renewable season tickets, 16,000 student tickets, the visiting team allotment of about 7,500 and what UGA say are a few other areas such as faculty-staff tickets. Those are the total people who are supposed to have their tickets scanned: 88,211.
• 4,535: This number includes people working at the game, such as concession staff, security, ticket takers and media (press box media, coaches’ booth, radio networks, photographers, national TV entity televising the game).
The above figures for tickets used come out of the 88,211 total. So just using that number, attendance at Georgia home games last year was just under 92 percent capacity, 87 percent in Kirby Smart’s first year and 77 percent in Mark Richt’s final year.
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Of course, not all of those people included in the 4,535 number show up to every game either, and that 4,535 number can be fungible as well, depending on who is credentialed for what game.
“Obviously that could float a little bit back and forth,” Brooks said. “But I think it’s generally a pretty good number to stick between to give you an estimate.”
Georgia is far from the only major school to have a big difference between announced and actual attendance. The Wall Street Journal, in a report last August, showed that Florida State’s actual turnout at games in 2017 was only 57 percent of announced attendance. Even Michigan, which has long boasted of 100,000-plus in attendance at the Big House, had two games last year in which actual attendance was below 80,000.
The average announced attendance at college football games has dropped in each of the past four years (prior to this year), a total decline of 7.6 percent. But the real turnout at the 100 schools that responded to the Wall Street Journal open records request in time for the story — Georgia did not — was about 71 percent of what was announced.
So Georgia is about 20 percentage points higher than the national average.
Attendance is a factor in scheduling, but the real factor is what Smart wants for competitive reasons. Georgia takes a small financial hit with the no-shows, but not a huge one, according to Brooks. It actually balances out sometimes when fewer people show up for a noon game because those that do come spend less time tailgating and spend more at stadium concessions.
“In the last couple years we’ve really put an emphasis on how we can make the experience better,” Brooks said. “Everything from ingress (entry into stadium) to extra attention to cleaning the restrooms, to examining every concession line, moving to more Grab ’N Go’s, dressing up the stadium, new graphics. We know some of the things we work on won’t be the difference between someone showing and not. But at the same time, our focus is to make our experience the best it possibly can. So hopefully in time, it will help our patrons be more loyal and keep showing.”
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The bottom line is that even if it’s not really 92,746, and not even 85,000, the effect is the same: a loud atmosphere that Smart has said aids in the team’s performance and recruiting.
“You look out there and see the crowd, this fan base,” Smart said after Saturday’s win against Auburn. “You look out there and say I could play in this atmosphere. I could play for championships. I could play in some of the biggest games in college football.”
(Top photo by University of Georgia Athletics)
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