Saturday, May 6, 2017

NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision Attendance Analysis

Today I want to look at NCAA FBS Home Game Attendance over the last eleven years.  I gathered the data from the NCAA's website and have plotted the data below for each season from 2006 to 2016 (last year).  Please note that I am using total home regular season attendance, and since some teams do play different amounts of home games from one year to the next, this might be skewing the data.  But as you can see below, most teams attendance from one season to the next looks fairly similar.  Yet, looks can be deceiving, so below I talk about a simple statistical analysis of home team regular season attendance.




Using a t-test, which is a statistical test of significance among columns (seasons) of data; I find that comparing consecutive seasons, that no sets of consecutive seasons are statistically different from each other.  Yes, teams attendance and league average attendance have increased and recently decreased during this time period, but I cannot rule out random chance for this occurring as well.  Thus, I would conclude that statistically, NCAA FBS attendance is not statistically different in consecutive seasons during this time period.