Last week, I published a review of home attendance at The Citadel (along with a brief look at last season’s attendance for Southern Conference games). For this post, I’m taking a look at FCS attendance as a whole for a ten-year period, 2012-22.
Of course, normally that would be an 11-year period, but I am not including games from fall 2020 and spring 2021. The COVID-era games were an obvious anomaly. A few schools played in the fall but not the spring, many played in the spring but not the fall, several played in both the fall and spring, and there were some that did not play at all.
In addition, attendance was restricted in most (if not all) areas for many of those games, and the actual accounting of attendance in some circumstances was — well, I won’t say dubious, but perhaps laissez-faire at best.
Ultimately, those games don’t reflect any trends from the past decade when it comes to attendance. I will acknowledge that the last two seasons could be considered to have been affected by the post-COVID world as well, and the statistics do bear that out to a certain extent, but I think including them in this grouping is reasonable.
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I put together an unruly spreadsheet to track FCS attendance over the past decade. Here it is:
Historical FCS attendance: 2012-19, 2021-22
The compiled statistics are from the NCAA. I had to make some corrections and adjustments, both for formatting reasons and because there were a few inaccuracies.
One thing the NCAA does in some of its reports is include stadium size and the percent capacity filled. This leads to some issues, as not all of the listed capacities are correct. There is also the occasional school that plays home games at multiple facilities (Tennessee State, for example).
I don’t really know how to evaluate stadium capacity for schools that have permanent seating but also occasionally employ temporary bleachers, or including standing room only, or have “berm” areas. For instance, Merrimack has a football facility (Duane Stadium) with a listed capacity of 3,500, but last season reported attendance of 8,147 for its home opener and 12,622 for its homecoming game.
There are other schools like this as well (East Tennessee State, Montana State, and Sacred Heart, just to name three). In general, I don’t really think comparing and contrasting capacity is worthwhile, especially when the numbers are often questionable, and so I only included those categories for the 2022 attendance tab on the spreadsheet. Incidentally, I corrected some capacity figures in that column. (I also “weighted” Tennessee State’s stadium capacity to account for its home games at both Hale Stadium and Nissan Stadium.)
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The first tab in the spreadsheet is titled ‘2012-22 FCS throughout’. That is my somewhat inelegant way of stating that the tab includes those institutions which were in FCS for the entirety of that time frame. There were 113 schools which competed in FCS for all 10 of those seasons (remember, fall 2020/spring 2021 is not included in these totals).
The average attendance for that collective ranged from a low of 7,294 (2021) to a high of 7,922 (2012). That is roughly an 8% drop-off, but last season’s attendance for the group actually rebounded to an average of 7,609.
I think a few people would be surprised at the relative consistency of attendance over that period. FCS attendance as a whole can be viewed as having declined to a greater degree, because the average attendance for the subdivision in 2012 was 8,575 (which can be seen in the spreadsheet’s tab for that season).
However, that 2012 average includes a slightly different set of schools. Appalachian State averaged 26,358 fans that year, and obviously the Mountaineers are no longer in FCS. Neither are Georgia Southern (which averaged 18,487 spectators per home game in 2012) or James Madison (22,783), among others.
The schools remaining in FCS have not collectively seen an abrupt decline in attendance. There are exceptions, to be sure, but they are on both sides of the equation, with increases (Holy Cross, Jackson State, Sacramento State) and decreases (Central Connecticut State, Lamar, Wofford).
That said, there might still be a “recovery” aspect to attendance post-COVID. Of the 113 schools in the group, 25 suffered their lowest average home attendance of this period last year. Conversely, 11 of the schools enjoyed their highest average attendance of that time frame last season (Alcorn State, Gardner-Webb, Holy Cross, Howard, Jackson State, Montana State, Murray State, Robert Morris, Sacramento State, Sacred Heart, and Texas Southern).
Of note, when taking into account all schools that competed in FCS in both seasons, 55.1% saw an attendance decline from 2019 to (fall) 2021. That is a collective of 127 institutions. For that same group, 52.0% had increased attendance from 2021 to 2022.
| Season | Average Att. | Median | Differential |
| 2022 | 7314 | 5986 | 1328 |
| 2021 | 7235 | 5677 | 1558 |
| 2019 | 7275 | 6467 | 808 |
| 2018 | 7326 | 6189 | 1137 |
| 2017 | 7798 | 6762 | 1036 |
| 2016 | 7777 | 6537 | 1240 |
| 2015 | 7765 | 6594 | 1171 |
| 2014 | 7630 | 6636 | 994 |
| 2013 | 7870 | 6894 | 976 |
| 2012 | 8575 | 7618 | 957 |
For the 2022 season, exactly half of the 130 FCS schools averaged 6,000+ in home attendance. While the average overall was 7,314, only 37.7% of the institutions actually had attendance in excess of that number.
In 2019, 70 of 127 FCS schools (55.1%) averaged 6000+ fans per home game. The 6,000+ mark was reached by 71 of 124 (57.1%) FCS schools in 2016, and 77 of 122 (63.1%) in 2012.
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The spreadsheet also includes a tab listing the yearly attendance throughout the time period for the current (as of 2022) FCS schools. A few of them will not be in the subdivision going forward, of course (Sam Houston State, Jacksonville State, etc.). There is also a column indicating conference affiliation. While some schools changed leagues between 2012 and 2022, the listed conference is the one for the 2022 campaign.
The remaining tabs are for individual seasons. The default sort by year is for average home attendance, although the columns can be sorted in any manner.
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I’ll be posting occasionally this fall about The Citadel’s football program, and FCS in general. There won’t be a set day or time. I’m just going to wing it this year…
Filed under: Football | Tagged: Attendance, East Tennessee State, FCS, Holy Cross, Jackson State, Merrimack, Montana, Montana State, Sacramento State, Sacred Heart, The Citadel | 1 Comment »
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