How does Faurot compare to the rest of College Football?

I know that Faurot isn't the Big House when talking about attendance, but we aren't small either. Not so long ago the stadium held 75,000 as a capacity but that really wasn't offical. Currently the stadium holds 71,004. This total includes the General Admission sold at the stadium. Let's look at all the Stand alone college stadiums and see where Mizzou ranks.

Rank	Stadium Name	Capacity	School
1	Michigan Stadium	109901	Michigan
2	Beaver Stadium	107282	Penn State
3	Neyland Stadium	102455	Tennessee
4	Ohio Stadium	102329	Ohio State
5	Bryant-Denny Stadium	101821	Alabama
6	Darrell K Royal Memorial Stadium	100119	Texas
7	Memorial Coliseum	93607	USC
8	Sanford Stadium	92746	Georgia
9	Rose Bowl	92542	UCLA
10	Tiger Stadium	92542	LSU
11	Ben-Hill Griffin Stadium	88548	Florida
12	Jordan-Hare Stadium	87451	Auburn
13	Kyle Field	82600	Texas A&M
14	Bobby Bowden Field	82300	FSU
15	Gaylord Family Memorial Stadium	82112	Oklahoma
16	Memorial Stadium	81500	Clemson
17	Memorial Stadium	81067	Nebraska
18	Notre Dame Stadium	80795	Notre Dame
19	Camp Randall Stadium	80321	Wisconsin
20	Williams-Brice Stadium	80250	South Carolina
21	Sun Devil Stadium	73379	Arizona State
22	Husky Stadium	72500	Washington
23	Donald W Reynolds Memorial Stadium	72000	Arkansas
24	Legion Field	72000	UAB
25	California Memorial Stadium	71799	California
26	Faurot Field	71004	Missouri

As you can see we are 26th. That isn't bad. We are about to expand the stadium. My suggestions would be to make it at a capacity of 80,000. We would then be at 21st which isn't bad. Just sell some Standing room only and get that place a rockin'. We will see how we do this year with Georgia, Alabama, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Arizona State and teams to be announced later to fill our schedule. If we can average over 67,000 and that would be almost 95% attendance then I can see the additions to the stadium then let's focus on making seats out of the existing space.

Mizzou's Football Attendance Numbers

I know that you when you go to Columbia to watch the Tigers you hear a lot of negative things about the empty seats at Memorial Stadium. Well that got me wandering. I was on TigerBoard and one poster pointed out that Mizzou finished 2011 ranked 25th in average attendance. I was surprised. I thought that with the underwhelming outcome at the Texas game and Tech game that we surely wouldn't rank that high, but we did. I then decided to do some further investigation and look up the numbers from past years. The latest data at NCAA.com was 2005. I thought that would be a good starting place because that was the Senior Year of Brad Smith. Let's look at the Data.

Year	Rank	Avg Attendance	Capacity	Percentage
2005	36	53364	68349	78.08%
2006	33	55918	68349	81.81%
2007	31	60232	68349	88.12%
2008	26	64520	68349	94.40%
2009	28	64120	71004	90.30%
2010	26	61540	71004	86.67%
2011	25	62095	71004	87.45%

As you can see from the chart, MU has been moving up the rankings in the last seven years. I just wanted to show you how the program has been improving and the fans have been coming out for the games. After Chase Daniel left the program to go to the NFL, the seating capacity in the stadium was expanded to 71,004. We have dropped a few thousand in numbers but I think we are beginning to gain that back. Next year I predict we will have 66,000+ in average attendance