Attendance Figures

[Duneaux Harm]

The link below takes you to the NCAA report on college football attendance in 2019. The Pitt average identifies roughly 44,000 people on average for 7 games. That seems inflated to me visually but I have no idea how attendance is counted. Is it bodies through the gate or just tickets that have been purchased and given away?

I looked at the game by game attendance for that year on the Pitt website and it really seemed overinflated for some of the non conference games. However the Thursday night Carolina game Actually listed a. 30 some thousand attendance figure on the Pitt website and it made me think that the attendance figures aren’t an actual fictional guesstimate and have some legitimate detail associated with it.

I did find it interesting that one of the colleges that showed an increased attendance over the year before was Carolina at home. This does give some credence to the begin to win and people will show up more frame of thought.

2019 Attendance

 

[King Of All Message Boards]

Someone posted they announced a little over 40k for this past week and likely real attendance wasn’t even that close to 25k.

Pitt inflates numbers. Whether it’s based on tickets sold or some other hocus pocus. But they’re certainly not alone.

But yea of course, winning would certainly help. And maybe just winning the games they’re supposed to win. Especially against MAC teams. Losing to crap BC teams stings but at least they’re conference foes.

 

[Gunga_Galunga]

I'm not claiming there were 40k there, but anyone who was there knows how many people weren't sitting in their seats because of the temp/sun. The great hall was full of people all game.

It's not tickets sold, so it's likely a random number generator.

 

[Sean Miller Fan]

Someone posted they announced a little over 40k for this past week and likely real attendance wasn’t even that close to 25k.

Pitt inflates numbers. Whether it’s based on tickets sold or some other hocus pocus. But they’re certainly not alone.

But yea of course, winning would certainly help. And maybe just winning the games they’re supposed to win. Especially against MAC teams. Losing to crap BC teams stings but at least they’re conference foes.

I counted the people in the upper deck endzone visitor side. There were less than 500. I didn't count the upper deck endzone but there couldn't have been 100. Lets say my count was way off and there were a combined 1000 people in the combined upper deck endzone/upper deck visitor side. That is, what 23K seats with 1000 people in them. That would mean that you would have to have 40K people sitting in the remaining 47K seats, so basically pretty the lower level, clubs, and upper deck home side would have had to be pretty close to being full.

I would estimate the crowd was around 15,000. Definitely not 20K

 

[Duneaux Harm]

I now reside in Tucson and get the daily paper so I can learn more about the town. U of A lost to a team on Saturday night and the announced attendance was 34,000 but the official count was a little over 19,000. So I would presume that the announced are tickets sold and official counts never make it.

 

[HailtoPitt]

It doesn't matter what attendance is. It's gonna look bad in HF with 70,000 bright yellow seats. We need a capacity of 40-45,000.

 

[Pitt_Boss]

I think the announced attendance for both Pitt home games this year was pretty similar, around 40k. I can tell you that there were significantly more people at the UMASS game than WMU. There was probably legit 30k+ for UMASS, maybe 35k. For WMU, it was maybe 20k. Also, it was sunny both days lol.

 

[byrne]

Pitt goes to TN to play in front of 84k people and come home to play in front of 20K. You wonder why the players didn't have any "juice". Pitt fans need to do their share to support the team. I watched the WM game on cable from NC and the empty seats looked pathetic.

 

[Slick Manager of Champs]

Pitt goes to TN to play in front of 84k people and come home to play in front of 20K. You wonder why the players didn't have any "juice". Pitt fans need to do their share to support the team. I watched the WM game on cable from NC and the empty seats looked pathetic.

empty seats for the Steelers also, many stand in the rotundas to avoid the blazing sun, or sit in the club and watch on TV. The sun was brutal, but I agree even if cloudy there still wouldn't have been a ton in the seats.

 

[Panther Holla]

We dwell on how many fans show up. The real question should be: Will Pitt show up?

 

[PittGuy00]

empty seats for the Steelers also, many stand in the rotundas to avoid the blazing sun, or sit in the club and watch on TV. The sun was brutal, but I agree even if cloudy there still wouldn't have been a ton in the seats.

Or they just didn't show up. Less people are going to games than ever before. Why go and deal with traffic, longs lines to get in to the stadium, long lines for bathrooms and concessions and high prices when you can just stay home and have a better viewing experience than you would even from the best seats.

 

[Sean Miller Fan]

Pitt goes to TN to play in front of 84k people and come home to play in front of 20K. You wonder why the players didn't have any "juice". Pitt fans need to do their share to support the team. I watched the WM game on cable from NC and the empty seats looked pathetic.

And part of this problem is most fans sit on the Pitt sideline. If there were 20K there, 15K were on the Pitt sideline with only 5K on the TV sideline, which just looks atrocious. I have been saying for years, Pitt should switch sidelines so more fans are in the TV view

 

[TFBaum]

The link below takes you to the NCAA report on college football attendance in 2019. The Pitt average identifies roughly 44,000 people on average for 7 games. That seems inflated to me visually but I have no idea how attendance is counted. Is it bodies through the gate or just tickets that have been purchased and given away?

I looked at the game by game attendance for that year on the Pitt website and it really seemed overinflated for some of the non conference games. However the Thursday night Carolina game Actually listed a. 30 some thousand attendance figure on the Pitt website and it made me think that the attendance figures aren’t an actual fictional guesstimate and have some legitimate detail associated with it.

I did find it interesting that one of the colleges that showed an increased attendance over the year before was Carolina at home. This does give some credence to the begin to win and people will show up more frame of thought.

2019 Attendance

It is an easy data science project just get digital photos of all the sections and run single value decomposition algorithm. The yellow seats would separate really fast.

 

[pittguy81]

The link below takes you to the NCAA report on college football attendance in 2019. The Pitt average identifies roughly 44,000 people on average for 7 games. That seems inflated to me visually but I have no idea how attendance is counted. Is it bodies through the gate or just tickets that have been purchased and given away?

I looked at the game by game attendance for that year on the Pitt website and it really seemed overinflated for some of the non conference games. However the Thursday night Carolina game Actually listed a. 30 some thousand attendance figure on the Pitt website and it made me think that the attendance figures aren’t an actual fictional guesstimate and have some legitimate detail associated with it.

I did find it interesting that one of the colleges that showed an increased attendance over the year before was Carolina at home. This does give some credence to the begin to win and people will show up more frame of thought.

2019 Attendance

Heinz Field can hold over 68,000 so if there are 44K attending there are still 1/3 of the yellow seats that are empty and stick out like a sore thumb.....and for some reason a lot of people loiter in the stadium's outer walkways...

I will note that for whatever reason the TV shots are always of the visitors side, which is much less populated than the home side lower bowl.

 

[Duneaux Harm]

It is an easy data science project just get digital photos of all the sections and run single value decomposition algorithm. The yellow seats would separate really fast.

Thanks for volunteering to do that.

 

[bwh05]

We had 29K for the opener against UMass. Slightly less for WMU.

 

[pittguy81]

We had 29K for the opener against UMass. Slightly less for WMU.

So I guess numbers pulled out of your a$$ are money......Yep...

 

[Gunga_Galunga]

We had 29K for the opener against UMass. Slightly less for WMU.

I know your number is legit. We'll still have to deal with guys like SMF who claim they were counting people from a quarter mile away. Like I said earlier, I don't think people realize how many people were in the great hall on the visitors side.

 

[Joe the Panther Fan]

We had 29K for the opener against UMass. Slightly less for WMU.

I believe the 29K for UMass number, in fact I said around 30,000 or a little more at the time, but there were far, far fewer people at the WM game than there were at the UMass game.

I think that they have may have finally started doing what I said for years that they should be doing, which is to say just announce the total number of tickets distributed and tell everyone that that is what they are going to do and then leave it at that.

 

[TFBaum]

Thanks for volunteering to do that.

An undergrad should do it.

 

[bwh05]

I know your number is legit. We'll still have to deal with guys like SMF who claim they were counting people from a quarter mile away. Like I said earlier, I don't think people realize how many people were in the great hall on the visitors side.

that's the turnstile count for UMass. I don't have the exact number for WMU yet, but we distributed less tickets so we were expecting a the crowd to be a little smaller.

 

[Burgh15]

If there were 29,000 for the opener there had to be fewer than 25,000 for Western Michigan. Since the Steelers were also brought up, there were 5,000 no shows. Very disappointing crowd there as well.

 

[TD_6082]

Perhaps Covid has something to do with it?

 

[PeetWeet1]

It is an easy data science project just get digital photos of all the sections and run single value decomposition algorithm. The yellow seats would separate really fast.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~venkatg/teaching/CStheory-infoage/book-chapter-4.pdf

While SVD has many useful applications, I am not sure how it is applicable to this problem. In all seriousness, this would be a great high school science fair or undergrad project. Heck, turn it into a real-time percent full app.

I’d try deep learning to count both people and seats , classical methods to count seats (and maybe people). Even really crude methods like determining the average hue of an image could be deemed useful - and very fast - in some situations like Pitt games at Heinz Field. At an advanced level, train a NN to not only identify fans, but guess their allegiance.

 

[Slick Manager of Champs]

Perhaps Covid has something to do with it?

People bash Pederson left and right on this board, but at least he tried to do some marketing. My City, My Panthers. Billboards with Graham promoting the new offense. Did anyone see one billboard this summer for Pitt football? One TV ad? Lyke seems like she has just washed her hands of it and doesn't want to address attendance. I had one friend who used to work in the tickets office and asked about tarping a year ago and he mentioned they didn't want to deal with trying to reseat people and the brush back on that.

If she worked for me, the #1 goal on her performance eval would be to do something about Heinz. The status quo of ignoring it is only making things worse.

 

[WannyandWalt]

People bash Pederson left and right on this board, but at least he tried to do some marketing. My City, My Panthers. Billboards with Graham promoting the new offense. Did anyone see one billboard this summer for Pitt football? One TV ad? Lyke seems like she has just washed her hands of it and doesn't want to address attendance. I had one friend who used to work in the tickets office and asked about tarping a year ago and he mentioned they didn't want to deal with trying to reseat people and the brush back on that.

If she worked for me, the #1 goal on her performance eval would be to do something about Heinz. The status quo of ignoring it is only making things worse.

So reward failure ? He tried, thats crap, he was a moron

 

[Slick Manager of Champs]

So reward failure ? He tried, thats crap, he was a moron

huh? Who's rewarding anything? Lyke has sat on her rear end about attendance. Yeah she was dealt a bad hand but you have to play what you are dealt.

His second stint Pederson did way more marketing than Lyke. At least he tried, she isn't.

I never said Heinz was the right move but again you have to play what you are dealt.

 

[PeetWeet1]

An undergrad should do it.

Unless I am missing something, I don’t think SVD is applicable. However, this would be a great high school science fair project. I’d recommend trying deep learning, advanced classical methods (hue filter; morphological open/ close transforms; moments, etc.), as well as really crude methods which include using a color transform and then using the resulting average HSV values [This would be Heinz specific].

For the really ambitious, a percent full phone app could be created.

For the super ambitious, an attempt to identify not only percent full, but a guess at the loyalty of each fan could be attempted.

PeetWeet

 

[TFBaum]

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~venkatg/teaching/CStheory-infoage/book-chapter-4.pdf

While SVD has many useful applications, I am not sure how it is applicable to this problem. In all seriousness, this would be a great high school science fair or undergrad project. Heck, turn it into a real-time percent full app.

I’d try deep learning to count both people and seats , classical methods to count seats (and maybe people). Even really crude methods like determining the average hue of an image could be deemed useful - and very fast - in some situations like Pitt games at Heinz Field. At an advanced level, train a NN to not only identify fans, but guess their allegiance.

A NN as you mentioned is the correct solution. I was using SVD yesterday and it was on my mind. It would be an interesting to understand the size of you crowd and the demographics.

 

[ThePanthers]

And part of this problem is most fans sit on the Pitt sideline. If there were 20K there, 15K were on the Pitt sideline with only 5K on the TV sideline, which just looks atrocious. I have been saying for years, Pitt should switch sidelines so more fans are in the TV view

Pitt fans sit on the home side for the shade. They'd have to switch all the TV set ups, which isn't going to happen at Heinz, unlike the Pete.

I have seats on the visistor side, and the Sept games are brutal sometimes, but I survive.

 

[Panther Holla]

The best pitchman for Pitt football was John Majors. Nobody else comes close, certainly not any of the ADs, who IMO should be banging the drums for fans. It would help if the coach was somebody the masses could warm up to, not just the people who are happy taking 19th hole selfies with Narduzzi.

 

[quip]

The link below takes you to the NCAA report on college football attendance in 2019. The Pitt average identifies roughly 44,000 people on average for 7 games. That seems inflated to me visually but I have no idea how attendance is counted. Is it bodies through the gate or just tickets that have been purchased and given away?

I looked at the game by game attendance for that year on the Pitt website and it really seemed overinflated for some of the non conference games. However the Thursday night Carolina game Actually listed a. 30 some thousand attendance figure on the Pitt website and it made me think that the attendance figures aren’t an actual fictional guesstimate and have some legitimate detail associated with it.

I did find it interesting that one of the colleges that showed an increased attendance over the year before was Carolina at home. This does give some credence to the begin to win and people will show up more frame of thought.

2019 Attendance

Tickets purchased are what Pitt uses. Steelers use attendance thru the turnstiles.

 

[Sean Miller Fan]

Pitt fans sit on the home side for the shade. They'd have to switch all the TV set ups, which isn't going to happen at Heinz, unlike the Pete.

I have seats on the visistor side, and the Sept games are brutal sometimes, but I survive.

I disagree. I think the primary reason the Pitt sideline is usually significantly more full is because, well, its the Pitt sidelines and football fans typically prefer to sit on their team's sideline. The twice/year heat may play a small part but its a minor factor.

If Pitt simply moved to the other sideline and had some type of universal reseating combined with closing the non-TV upper deck, the place would look 10 times better on TV

 

[Slick Manager of Champs]

The best pitchman for Pitt football was John Majors. Nobody else comes close, certainly not any of the ADs, who IMO should be banging the drums for fans. It would help if the coach was somebody the masses could warm up to, not just the people who are happy taking 19th hole selfies with Narduzzi.

The irony is I remember someone at Pitt at the time they hired Narduzzi said he's the type of guy that Pittsburghers would like.

 

[ThePanthers]

I disagree. I think the primary reason the Pitt sideline is usually significantly more full is because, well, its the Pitt sidelines and football fans typically prefer to sit on their team's sideline. The twice/year heat may play a small part but its a minor factor.

If Pitt simply moved to the other sideline and had some type of universal reseating combined with closing the non-TV upper deck, the place would look 10 times better on TV

We'll see when the weather gets cooler later in the season if it's more evenly distributed. I'd say the sun is a much bigger factor. If you looked at the visitor upper deck last game in any of the pics, the upper part was more full because they were sitting in the shade of the overhang.

 

[Panther Holla]

We'll see when the weather gets cooler later in the season if it's more evenly distributed. I'd say the sun is a much bigger factor. If you looked at the visitor upper deck last game in any of the pics, the upper part was more full because they were sitting in the shade of the overhang.

No way I'd sit on the east side even if Pitt's sideline was there. The sun is brutal. West side might be chillier in late fall shade or at night, but I'll take another layer over the sun's glare in my eyes.

 

[ThePanthers]

No way I'd sit on the east side even if Pitt's sideline was there. The sun is brutal. West side might be chillier in late fall shade or at night, but I'll take another layer over the sun's glare in my eyes.

I know a lot of people that move over to the other side that have seats on the visitors due to the sun. The seats are open, so why not. They typically stay in their seats during night games or later in the fall when it's cooler.

That first game, the home side was much more populated since it ws in the shade most of the game. I sit in the club section on the visitor side, so I can go in and out as needed, so I don't move.

 

[Pitt79]

This does give some credence to the begin to win and people will show up more frame of thought.

2019 Attendance

Well, duh... I remember they where having a good year, winning, in 2003 and they had ESPN Game Day there for a Saturday Night game, they where 6-2 at the time vs VT, FREEZING weather, but it was very full. the 45-44 loss to Cincy was pretty full too, that was a defacto BE Title game. So sure, more people come out when the team is good or better.

 

[Slick Manager of Champs]

Well, duh... I remember they where having a good year, winning, in 2003 and they had ESPN Game Day there for a Saturday Night game, they where 6-2 at the time vs VT, FREEZING weather, but it was very full. the 45-44 loss to Cincy was pretty full too, that was a defacto BE Title game. So sure, more people come out when the team is good or better.

except you where soccer used to take precedence (sorry I couldn't resist. No offense).

 

[WannyandWalt]

huh? Who's rewarding anything? Lyke has sat on her rear end about attendance. Yeah she was dealt a bad hand but you have to play what you are dealt.

His second stint Pederson did way more marketing than Lyke. At least he tried, she isn't.

I never said Heinz was the right move but again you have to play what you are dealt.

Agree , I see your point