Alright. I'm trying to reconcile my tracker to these numbers. And as I get to compare my tracker outputs to actual announced attendance numbers this season, I plan to refine my methodology as needed to make it as accurate as possible.
Reminder of my assumptions and methodology:
1. We have no public data available on student ticket sales, so my tracker assumes that every seat (4,350) in the North End Zone is full. Same goes for the Colonnades Club (1,164) and 77 Club (204). I just ignore those seats and assume they are all sold.
2. Sections near the end zone often show as having no tickets for sale since they are used for student ticket overflow, visiting fans, recruits, etc. I have to assume the majority, if not all of these seats are unsold if they are not showing on the ticket site.
3. The ticket site often shows rows with no tickets available even when they are 100% unsold. Typically the site makes lower rows available for sale and then opens up higher rows for sale when the lower rows' tickets are purchased.
4. Once I have a count for all the unsold tickets in the stadium, I subtract that from the capacity of 60,670.
Comparison of the 2022 ticket tracker to announced crowds:
I did the ticket tracker for the MSU and Purdue games last year, so I went back and looked and had the following variances:
View attachment 27888
Revised Tracker for Toledo:
I mentioned above that typically only higher up rows are held back and show zero tickets available for sale despite actually being 100% unsold. Unfortunately today, the ticket site had several lower/middle of the section rows in about 8 different sections start showing with anywhere between 20-30 seats now available for sale. These would have been rows that were counted as 100%
sold in my tracker up to this point, so the tracker actually moved in the wrong direction today. That said, it still shows an estimate of 46,315, following all of the methodology above.
View attachment 27891
Conclusion:
I'm prepared to eat my words, but I still believe this estimate is a bit conservative and actual attendance will be above this. I have to believe that Jeremy Werner's 40k estimate is either old or simply inaccurate - which is rare for him. Cassie Arner's 44-45k estimate is likely much closer to actual attendance, but I still think it's a bit light!