TOO MANY NO-SHOWS: ATTENDANCE REPORTS AT NORTH CAROLINA'S BIGGEST COLLEGE FOOTBALL STADIUMS ARE OFTEN EXAGGERATED.

• Author: Pomeranz, Jim

As Hurricane Matthew passed through eastern North Carolina in October 2016, N.C. State University's football team defeated Notre Dame 10-3 on the flooded turf of Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh. Despite hurricane-force winds and steady sheets of rain, N.C. State reported attendance of 58,200, because that's how many tickets were distributed.

Anyone there or at home, a sports bar, a brewery, or any other place watching the nationally televised game knows that the actual crowd was much smaller. In fact, 24,659 tickets with bar codes were scanned at the gates as the fans filed in for the game, N.C. State officials said in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Welcome to the world of "announced" college football attendance --"tickets out" which are paid or comped--versus actual attendance, or tickets scanned. Athletics administrators prefer everyone with a ticket use it because of the multiplier effect of concession sales, parking fees, merchandise and other income generators. Meanwhile, coaches tend to prefer to dwell on announced attendance instead of "fannies in seats" because the higher number can boost recruiting and requests for added resources and strengthen a coach's hand when a contract comes up for renewal.

While the N.C. State-Notre Dame game was an outlier because of Matthew's presence, there's been a sizeable gap between announced attendance and tickets scanned over the last five years at Wolfpack, UNC Chapel Hill and East Carolina University games, according to information supplied by the universities. N.C. State and UNC wouldn't provide details without a formal Freedom of Information Act request, which East Carolina did not require.

Tickets scanned include students but do not account for ticket-takers, concession workers, credentialed personnel such as school officials and members of the media, public safety, housekeeping, and medical staff, according to Lynda Mottershead, a legal assistant at the N.C. State...