Fudging the Numbers: LA Times Reveals UCLA Football's Real Attendance Numbers
What may be worse than learning how bad the numbers have gotten is that the fact that the school has been fudging attendance numbers since the 1960s.
I remember going to UCLA football games at the Rose Bowl in the 90’s and 2000’s. One of the most fun portions of the evening would come when inevitably the Guess the Attendance quiz would pop up on the Rose Bowl screens. Fans would be given four options and I would take a look around the stadium and make my best guess. Sometimes, I was right. Other times, not so much.
But UCLA stopped doing that a long time ago. If I recall correctly, they stopped as attendance began slipping due to team performance that was…lackluster.
Nowadays, if you want to know the attendance, you have to either head to a site like ESPN, which lists it among other details for the game, or to uclabruins.com which includes the number in the box score.
All of those numbers are now in question.
Coming on the heels of UCLA’s second-lowest announced attendance for a home opener is a blockbuster report from Ben Bolch at the LA Times.
In the article, Bolch explains how UCLA actually determines the announced attendance figure. He writes that UCLA counts:
“tickets distributed — including freebies — plus non-ticketed and credentialed individuals such as players, coaches, staff, vendors, cheerleaders, band members, performers and even media.”
Bolch used public records requests to gain information regarding the number of tickets scanned at the Rose Bowl for UCLA football games. The numbers are significantly lower than the announced attendance in most cases.
For instance, Bolch cites the difference between the announced attendance for the 2022 home opener against Bowling Green and the number of tickets scanned. The announced attendance that hot sweltering afternoon was 27,143, but the scanned tickets totaled only 12,383. Wow. That’s a difference of almost 15,000! In fact, it’s more than double the number of tickets scanned.
Bolch has published the scan counts dating back to the start of the 2021 season — and they are as ugly as Saturday night’s loss to Utah was.
So, for the past three years, the announced attendance outpaces the scanned attendance by 27%. That’s a pretty huge difference. And, it points to a lot of no-shows, even if they are counting “tickets distributed.”
Of course, this would be much bigger if this were a new phenomenon. Bolch’s article details that “creative accounting might pre-date the eight-clap.”
He mentions how “UCLA officials have been known to embellish attendance figures, sometimes rounding far enough past the next thousand not to strain credulity, according to two people familiar with operations who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.”
I can only guess who those two people may be. While I do have my suspicions who they could be, they are just suspicions and I wouldn’t want to speculate who they might be. That said, the fact that this matter is considered “sensitive” tells you almost everything you need to know.
But Bolch goes even deeper.
He traces the practice all the way back to J.D. Morgan, the former UCLA athletic director for whom the Morgan Center is named. Bolch writes:
Additionally, according to a former university administrator who observed the practice, a member of the athletic department staff would show a slip of paper with a suggested attendance figure for basketball games at Pauley Pavilion in the 1960s and 1970s to athletic director J.D. Morgan, who would either nod or take a pen and change the number to one more to his liking. That practice continued under subsequent athletic director Peter Dalis, the administrator said.
On one hand, I get it. I’ve personally been told by a former athletic department staff member that his job was to make UCLA Athletics look good.
At the same time, the university is a public entity. The public should expect honesty and transparency out of officials working for on behalf of the public, even in education.
Suggesting that the attendance is higher than it really is maybe a “little white lie,” but it is, indeed, a lie. UCLA is supposed to be the blue-and-gold standard.
And, it’s time for the school to stop fudging the attendance numbers and start reporting the number of fans actually in attendance. Not including players, coaches, staff, cheerleaders, and media members would be a good start.
Go Bruins.
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Ehh, every school in the country fudges numbers to some extent. Steven Godfrey told a great story on his podcast about sitting next to the SIDs at an SEC school who were deciding the attendance numbers in front of the press. Sometimes they like to throw little in-jokes in the numbers, like the score of a rivalry game at the end.
The bigger story is that even the fudged numbers are low, because that's where UCLA is at now. UCLA could only manage "35k" on a holiday weekend with no competition from the NFL and with a real opponent. That's frankly embarassing and as much an indictment of the current regime (coaches and athletic director) as anything else.
They seriously count the players as part of the attendance?? Well I hope they at least subtracted the 11 guys on "defense" last Saturday.
The numbers fudging that Bolch uncovers is bad enough. It also shouldn't detract from the big picture that shows, even with the figures massaged, that attendance absolutely sucks. And that's a direct indictment of the leadership in the athletic department and football program over the last 20 years.
The dysfunction just keeps growing.