A sell out?

September 15, 2006 11:48 AM

How does the media predict the number of fans traveling to see an away game?

Tomorrow I will be attending the USC vs. Nebraska college football game in LA. Nebraska fans are notorious travelers, and the various media outlets around the country have been estimating the number of Husker faithful who will be traveling to the game.

Most newspapers are saying between 20,000 and 30,000 Husker fans will be coming. How are they arriving at this guess?

It seems like at first they could easily count the number of visitor tickets sold and to which zip code--but this wouldn't paint the full picture, because people like me purchased tickets via eBay, craigslist or directly through a California contact.

So how do they arrive at this number? How can they possibly estimate with any certainty that 20,000 are going to show up?

posted by dead_ to grab bag (6 comments total)

Surely they just use the number of total visitors' tickets. Am I missing something?

How can they possibly estimate with any certainty that 20,000 are going to show up?

Why would people buy tickets then not show? In any case, the estimation would be that they would.
posted by wackybrit at 11:56 AM on September 15, 2006

The away team in most college sports are allocated a certain number of seats. Likely in this big of a game both athletically and financially, built into the contract of who gets how much revenue from the game is the number of tickets allocated to each team. The revenue sharing could be that Nebraska gets to sell 30,000 seats and keep the proceeds. It could be a percentage of the stadium.

Then, you addd some fudge number for the folks like you who buy in ebay or who show up looking to buy tickets at the stadium. A lot of season ticket holders do not use their tickets for one reason or another and some sell their extras at the gate or to brokers to resell.

ALso, most newspapers pick a number that is high enough to generate hype without being viewed as bs. 20.000 to 30,000 is a big range.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 12:09 PM on September 15, 2006

I can't tell you exactly which data they use, but they have many decades of prior events to compare to.

e.g. Even if the visitor tickets sold in advance don't at all reflect the actual number of visitors that show up, there is almost certainly a strong pattern of when X visitor tickets are sold in advance for a USC/Nebraska game, then Y visitors show up.
posted by winston at 12:33 PM on September 15, 2006

Those kinds of predictions are what is known as a SWAG.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 12:40 PM on September 15, 2006

Keep in mind also that the media doesn't predict anything. They take what the sports information director (aka the college's athletic department PR guy and his staff) and report that.

How the SID arrives at the number is another question entirely. But from working college sports in the past, I'd say about 90 percent is just plain guessing with a little bit of "let's make it look good" thrown in for good measure.
posted by frogan at 1:10 PM on September 15, 2006

Previous company used:

# of seats (+ SRO if available) - season tix + avg visiting team's last home game attendance (/ .3) + avg home fan attendance.

roughly
posted by parmanparman at 1:12 PM on September 15, 2006