In our last post, we examined overall attendance for NCAA football. This time around we take a look at individual team attendance. Unsurprisingly the best teams with the largest numbers of alumni have the best attendance rates. Alabama leads in total attendance for the past five years (4,225,443), which is to be expected given that they have been competing for a playoff spot every year recently. Ohio State is second with 4,003.658, while Tennessee’s attendance seems to have outperformed its ranking at 3,845,002. Penn State (3,805,806) and Michigan (3,727,339) round out the top five.
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The picture of average attendance unsurprisingly features the same five teams, but in a different order. In the case of average attendance, Michigan leads the pack at 106,495, followed by Ohio State (97,650), Penn State (97,584), Tennessee (96,125) and Alabama (96,032).
While Ohio State’s attendance is impressive, its fandom demonstrates a fair amount of variance—second highest in all of college football, in fact—second only to Florida. Texas A&M, Georgia, and Florida State round out the top five in terms of week over week attendance fluctuation. The schools with the lowest amount of variance are also those with smaller stadiums and lowest total (and average) attendance. In fact, none of the 50 teams with the lowest amount of variance had desirable attendance numbers and none have been ranked in the top 25 in the past five years.