Missouri's Football Attendance (Revisited)

I went back in and added the numbers for the 2012 season, which were a record (with the help of 3 sellouts during the season) As you can see the attendance shot up drastically with the introduction to the SEC. They will go down this year with the loss of nearly 4,000 seats for this season. Take at what I said about this season last January and see that I was short on my prediction of 66,000 fans. It was closer to 67,500.

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