Spring Football: Who showed up at Rutgers & around the Big Ten

There was a football game - sorta - on Saturday at High Point Solutions Stadium. And you know what that means....

I get to talk about attendance! Whoo hoo!

Okay, I know. Who cares? It’s a spring game. Or touch football or something like that. So who came out to watch?

Rutgers had an announced crowd of 13,158, which was the number of tickets that were distributed. It wasn’t a great day: drizzly, cool. Just not a great day to draw folks out. But it could have been worse. We could have been Maryland.

Maryland’s weather conditions weren’t much different from Rutgers’. But apparently attendance was so bad, Maryland didn’t announce any numbers. Not estimates, not tickets distributed. Nada. And people took notice.

In fairness to the Twerps - and that can be a difficult thing to do for us - someone wrote that a lot of fans were under cover on the near side. Rutgers only has people sit on one side during the Spring Game so TV cameras see a larger crowd. But apparently it was just really bad. And those guys went to a bowl game!

Note: For all our numbers, we utilized the resources of gridironnow.com.

Then there is the insanity that is Ohio State, Nebraska, and The Cult. Huge numbers, very much expected and (sadly) understandable.

The SEC had ridiculously large numbers, too. Of course they did.

Ten of the top 25 attendance figures were SEC schools, led by Alabama (74,326), Georgia (66,133), Florida (estimated 48,000), Auburn (46,331), and LSU and Tennessee (estimated 35,000).

Six of the top 25 were from the Big Ten (including RU at No. 24), four from the ACC, three were Big XII schools, along with USC and Notre Dame.

Why do we (I) care? For Rutgers, there’s no money involved; tickets are free. But it is a perception thing. You have recruits on site; they see the fans or lack of them. Look at Maryland; whether it was fair or not, whether the photos were unfair, it went at least semi-viral. The commentary is that Maryland fans just aren’t excited about their football team.

Is that true? Maybe - probably - not. But social media showed otherwise. And that’s why I keep writing about it.