This time of year, Oregon’s primary sports obsession is the University of Oregon Ducks, a perennially top-ranked football team that plays in front of rabid fans in one of the loudest stadiums in college sports. Even with one of the worst season openings in years, the Ducks are still a major draw on Saturdays.
Each game, TV broadcasters announce the reported home attendance, and it typically lands near Autzen Stadium’s capacity of just over 60,000 when standing room is included. That no doubt will be the case when Nebraska meets the Ducks in Eugene on Saturday.
But Oregon Journalism Project has learned that the turnstiles tell a different story. Ticket scan data shows that 1 in 5 people holding Ducks tickets last season didn’t show up. The Ducks’ actual average attendance was 46,696 per game.
The padded count is not unusual. While most Division I schools inflate their attendance numbers, UO actually performs better when compared with its peers.
Last season, for example, Oregon State University’s announced attendance at home games at Reser Stadium averaged 30,145. In fact, barely 19,000 fans filled the seats, an average no-show rate of 37%.
Kevin Griffin, vice president and director of athletics at OSU who took over in July, attributes the high no-show rate to inconvenient game times, a fan base that isn’t local, and the Pac-12 Beavers’ recent 2-10 and 5-7 losing seasons.
The Ducks’ rival to the north, Seattle’s University of Washington Huskies, averaged 27% no-shows. (Admittedly, UW plays in a city that is also home to the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks.) That number was worse than the Ducks’ 20% but far better than the Beavers’ 37%.
In the sports industry, ticket holders not showing up at an event is called “melt,” said Linfield University economics professor Randy Grant, co-author of “The Economics of Intercollegiate Sports.”
With any sporting event, a certain amount of melt is expected, Grant said.
Even so, these schools leave money on the table when they don’t fill seats.
While the unused tickets have been sold, the university is still missing the revenue that each ticket holder spends on parking, food, drinks and souvenirs. At about 80,000 no-shows over the past season, the Ducks could be losing net revenue in the seven figures, according to an OJP review of recent NCAA financial reports.
One reason for announcing the padded attendance numbers: They give the impression of more eyeballs inside the stadium to keep paying sponsors happy, Grant told OJP.
“If nobody’s going to show up, then having your logo there isn’t worth nearly as much as if you’ve got a packed house,” he said.
OJP received the real numbers on last year’s Ducks and Beavers football attendance from journalist David Covucci of FOIAball, who gathered this data from 55 public universities through freedom of information requests. OJP also obtained data for the Ducks’ current season.
Last year, UO had one of the better “real” attendance rates of the 55 schools that released data to Covucci. Its highest rate was 84.3% at the Oct. 11 game against Indiana, which would go on to win the national championship. The worst followed just two weeks later — 72.6% at the Ducks’ homecoming game against the Wisconsin Badgers.
Grant says UO’s status as a playoff contender and its loyal fan base help explain why the Ducks maintain higher rates of attendance at home games than OSU and peer football programs.
That trend continued this year, with 84% attendance at UO’s home opener against Boise State, but only 70% attendance at its second home game, an 84-0 blowout against Portland State University.
“When you have those sort of cupcake games against lower-level teams,” Grant said, fans may decide “yeah, if I’m going to miss a game, that’s probably the one to miss.”
Jimmy Stanton, spokesman for the University of Oregon’s athletic department, didn’t provide an answer why 20% of tickets went unused each home game. Stanton noted in an email that fans may transfer or sell unused tickets on the Ducks’ online resale platform run by Ticketmaster.
“For the handful of patrons who do not utilize tickets for a given game,” he wrote, “you’d have to speak with them directly.”
Oregon Journalism Project
This story was produced by the Oregon Journalism Project, a nonprofit investigative newsroom for the state of Oregon. OJP seeks to inform, engage and empower Oregonians with investigative and watchdog reporting that makes a significant impact at the state and local levels. Its stories appear in partner newspapers across the state. Learn more at oregonjournalismproject.org.