With spring games comes the latent competition we’re all thrilled to follow: Whose reported attendance figure is the highest? The Buckeyes currently hold the top three all-time figures, cracking 100,000 in 2016, but who’s leading 2017?
So far, the Ohio State Buckeyes have the highest figure, with 80,134 fans packing into The Shoe, which had its upper deck closed off. OSU fans were even seen scalping tickets before the game.
Here’s where we’re at, with one weekend of this still to go:
Claimed 2017 spring game attendance
| Rank | School | Attendence |
|---|---|---|
| Rank | School | Attendence |
| 1 | Ohio State | 80,134 |
| 2 | Nebraska | 78,312 |
| 3 | Alabama | 74,326 |
| 4 | Penn State | 71,000 |
| 5 | Georgia | 66,183 |
| 6 | Clemson | 60,000 |
| 7 | Michigan | 57,418 |
| 8 | Florida | 48,000 |
| 9 | Auburn | 46,331 |
| 10 | Oklahoma | 43,723 |
Attendance figures across spring games are pretty unreliable and oftentimes intentionally shrouded in mystery as to what the attendance number actually signifies. Is it tickets sold at the box office or the turnstile count? Is it just eyeballing? Either way, spring attendance figures vary across the country.
At this point, there is still a heavy hitter or two left to go, so we’ll see how the final rankings shake out.
Keeping track of this might seem silly, if you’re not a college football fan, but it’s about the only competition we have to pay attention to at this point in the year, other than recruiting and seeing who can get more pumped up by the standard spring ball storylines.