A Journey Through the Lowest Attended Games of the Kelly Era

If there’s football this fall one thing seems clear, there will be a giant asterisk for the season when it comes to attendance. Butts in seats has always been a contentious issue exacerbated by Notre Dame “officially” giving up on its decades-long sellout streak in 2019. It’s guaranteed there will be no sellouts in 2020 and an entire sport playing in front of sparse crowds as the COVID-19 impact remains at the forefront of college athletics.

In preparation for some serious quiet Saturday stadiums I went back and looked at the lowest attended Notre Dame games since 2010. The results aren’t very surprising but there are some interesting things to point out.

The Lowest Attended ND Games 2010-19

Stanford, Boston College, and Navy make up 57.1% of all the games listed.

That’s a bit harsh for BC just because their stadium is so small and one of the games was played at Fenway Park. As you can see, each of the 4 games were sellouts and beyond.

Stanford’s new-ish stadium is very small for a Power 5 school (50,000) and their poorly attended crowds are well-known throughout the realm. There are multiple sellouts included in this list but even then it’s difficult to trust those numbers completely. Tickets sold does not always equal gate attendance in Palo Alto and elsewhere.

Last year’s game at Stanford is one of the more embarrassing in recent memory, a good reminder that not only is their stadium small but the Cardinal absolutely sucked in 2019.

One of the biggest stories of the off-season is the upcoming Navy game being moved to their home stadium in Annapolis for the first time ever. Since it’s at a neutral site when it’s a Navy home game, there have been roughly 105,000 more people attending the 5 games since 2010 than if they were held on Navy’s campus. At $50 per ticket that equals $6.3 million in revenue. However, they reportedly send a cut to Notre Dame and of course have to take on massive travel costs (including to Dublin!) instead of a home game and I really wonder how financially lucrative this arrangement is for Navy?

One thing is certain, a half full FedEx Field is about the worst college football can get.

If you recall, when Notre Dame visited Wake Forest for the first time back in 2011 they brought in additional seating to go well over capacity. The novelty apparently wore off for the second visit.

Missing out on even a three-quarters full stadium for the Camping World Bowl was not unexpected given some of Notre Dame’s rumored other opponents, bowl destinations, and the disappointment therein. The lower two tiers of the stadium were quite full but the upper-bowl was largely empty outside of the mid-field seats.

The 2016 game against Army seemed like a sparse crowd at the time but looking back it wasn’t that bad. Like this past year’s bowl game, the upper-deck was pretty empty. I chalk this up to the Alamodome feeling like a terrible venue.

One more game jumped out to me although it didn’t make the list above. Only 59,821 fans were at the 2018 game against USC. My best guess is this is the fewest people ever to watch a Notre Dame game at USC in series history, unless there was some generational bad weather game decades ago.

USC did complete a massive renovation of the Coliseum in time for that 2018 game which made it 77.1% capacity, not terrible but far from the usual for this rivalry game. Here’s the attendance for these games stretching back to 1998:

• 2016 – 72,402
• 2014 – 79,586
• 2012 – 93,607
• 2010 – 85,417
• 2008 – 90,689
• 2006 – 91,800
• 2004 – 92,611
• 2002 – 91,432
• 2000 – 81,342
• 1998 – 90,069

The Coliseum used to be a cavernous 93,607 seats prior to the renovation and there’s only one sellout on there when undefeated Notre Dame came to town to end 2012. I think the rivalry is in a weird place right now.