∞∞∞ wrote:AZGrizFan wrote:I thought that had gone by the wayside.
Well, other schools use creative ways to get the rolling average over 15000 (even EMU). UMass and USA clearly haven't figured those methods out yet, although I'm sure they quickly will.
From csnbbs
http://csnbbs.com/showthread.php?tid=64 ... pid9576012" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
There are two sets of numbers.
The publicly available attendance numbers on the NCAA website are from the box scores the schools send in as part of the stats record keeping. Those numbers have absolutely no meaning for FBS purposes. Those numbers could be tickets distributed, turnstile count, or the SID looking out the press box window and writing down the number that looks "about right".
A second set of numbers is submitted in February. It is the certified count and those are the numbers that matter.
Those numbers are:
1. Tickets sold provided those tickets meet minimum pricing (ie. not less than 1/2 the price of the most expensive ticket available to the general public).
2. Students admitted for free if they pay student fee for athletics.
3. Tickets priced less than in #1 but at least 1/3rd the cost of the most expensive ticket) that are actually used.
4. Tickets purchased by a booster club are excluded from the count. One institution entering CUSA this year is currently on attendance probation for another 7 years or so because of an accounting error (or more correctly someone keeping the books in a proper accounting manner). The school had previously counted donations to the booster club like this. Donor gives $100, they treated it as the purchase of $100 in tickets, the tickets were then "donated" to the booster club. One year they marked those down in the books as a donation of $100 and then the booster club purchased the tickets. That made those previously counted tickets not count because they were reflected (accurately) as a donation followed by a booster club purchase. The new person who screwed that up was counseled and they've had no problems since.
Accounting matters. Let's say your cheap ticket is $20 and top ticket is $300. You do a bulk deal with a local business. They spend $2000 for 400 tickets. That's an effective price of $5. None of the 400 count. Restructure it so they receive 200 tickets at $10 and 200 free. If 200 get used you can count 200. Or you write it up as 133 tickets at $15 and 267 comped. You can count the 133 whether or not they are used.
Box score numbers and the certified count don't often match up well. For example several years back the Kansas City Star found that the box score counts for Kansas were nearly double the certified count. One of the Tampa/St. Pete papers found a similar gap at USF around the time they moving up. Nearly 20 years ago Arkansas State had a promotion with a local business to sell super discounted tickets for a big local game. The marketing director who put it together had the fee from the business deposited in the marketing account (more glory!) rather than paid to the Central Box Office. Because of how that was done, just over 16,000 of a crowd of 30,000 was countable.
