Recently the
NCAA posted the attendance data for the 2017 season. So let's take a look what happened in terms of attendance in the football bowl subdivision. First thing to notice is that average team season attendance is the lowest it has been since 2008's average season attendance of 291,053 to 264,397 in 2017. Average attendance this past season decreased by 7,485 which is the largest decline since the 2013 to 2014 season decline of 10,441 fans per team on average. The correlation of average season attendance from the 2016 to 2017 season is 0.9699 which is almost identical from one season to another since the 2006 to 2007 seasons.
Given this decline in average season attendance, the question is if the decline is statistically significant. In order to determine this I calculated a pairwise t-test on the average season attendance over the last two seasons. Using a 95% confidence level, which is standard in statistics, I find that the pairwise t-test "fails to accept" that the two seasons are statistically significant different from each other. So while attendance is down, it is not significantly down.
