He says, “In fact, the whopping 77 bowl appearances that SEC schools have made in the BCS era give them a commanding lead in this category. At a distant second is the Pac-10, with only 55 bowl appearances in the same time period.”
This fact would mean something if the two conference had an equal amount of teams. In the BCS era, the SEC has had 120 chances for its teams to go to a bowl game. The Pac-10 has had 100. Therefore, 45 Pac-10 teams missed a bowl game since 1998. 43 SEC teams missed a bowl game since 1998. Now does the stat make sense to you, Brian?
Brian continues to defy logic as he goes on to say, “Despite the fact that the Big Ten has some of the largest capacity stadiums in the nation, the SEC continues to shatter college football attendance records. In 2007, Alabama fans actually packed Bryant-Denny Stadium with 92,000 for the Spring Game!”
What college football attendance records do you shatter? That the Yale Bowl has an attendance of 20,000 more people than Vanderbilt’s stadium even holds?
- B/R Ticket Guide
And it’s not really despite the fact that Big Ten schools have the largest capacity stadiums when the Big Ten owns the school with the largest average attendance. Michigan average 110,026. Penn State averaged 107,567. Ohio State averaged 105,096.
The SEC’s best? Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium at 105,789. Congratulations, if your thing is building mega-stadiums, you still come in second place. And this time to an even more unworthy opponent, the Big Ten. Tennessee, SEC’s leader, would sneak by with the third largest attendance in the Big Ten.
The SEC hardly even beats the Pac-10 top to bottom, as the SEC has 9 teams in the top 36 attendance leaders, while the Pac-10 has 7.
Scott goes on to say, “Even Vanderbilt, who only has a student population of just over six thousand, averages almost 35,000 fans per game in the post-Jay Cutler era.”
Firstly, Vanderbilt has just over 6,000 undergraduate students, not overall. I think a team that has a similar student population lies within Pac-10 territory: Stanford with 6,700 undergraduates. Stanford’s average attendance in 2006 was 41,742.
That’s not to mention that the Nashville metro area has 1.5 million people living in it, while puny Palo Alto, California has a population of 61 thousand. Please don’t claim that even Vanderbilt has such a great following. It’s a stupid argument.
Scott talks about the tailgates and such, and that’s great. But that has nothing to do with football or who’s a better conference. Just because I wake up at 7 o’clock and day drink all day in a parking lot does not make me a better football fan. All you are saying is that a football game is more of a social event than compared to other places in the country.
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