Why 10K looks the same as 15K: understanding how MSU figures baseball attendance
Trying to guess the attendance at Dudy Noble Field can be a difficult task because 10K can look a lot like 15K and vice versa.
Mississippi State owns every record you could imagine for college baseball attendance. Dudy Noble Field is home to the top 13 on-campus crowds in the history of the sport. Bulldog fans are passionate about baseball and love the atmosphere of the Left Field Lounge. The Dude has the room so we pack it out.
But there’s a lot of confusing things and misunderstandings about how MSU figures the attendance numbers they announce. Here are some questions we will answer:
- Why are there 15,000 people there for Super Bulldog Weekend but only 10,000 for a Regional game? Is it the lack of students?
- Why does the crowd of 10,000 for a Regional game look the same as the crowd of 15,000 for Super Bulldog Weekend? Are there just less people socializing behind the rigs?
- Will MSU break the all-time attendance mark this weekend? They have to, right?
Here’s the big difference: when Mississippi State says there are 15,000 some odd people at a Super Bulldog Weekend baseball game, there aren’t. They were 15,000 some odd tickets sold.
Just like there aren’t 6,541 people at a Tuesday night game in February, there aren’t 15,000 people at SBW. They are just announcing tickets sold – there were just 1,200 people that Tuesday night and 10-12K at SBW.
Once Regionals and Super Regionals come along you have to play by the NCAA’s rules and they only count people walking through the turnstiles. So the 10,656 people who saw MSU beat Cal State Fullerton on Saturday night were actually 10,656 people.
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That’s why everyone is looking around going, ‘hey, this crowd has to be 13-14,000 people’, then get confused when the announced crowd is much less.
Take the 2007 Super Regional vs. Clemson. THAT crowd is the record for most people in attendance at Dudy Noble Field: 13,715.
I was there, and there was no room to move. I remember standing behind the scoreboard against the metal fence and there wasn’t any room to go anywhere else. Inning by inning I worked my way up to a rig in Right Field where I had a couple of friends and thought it was going to collapse on me when the final out was secured.
When the all-time record was broken in 2014 vs. Ole Miss everyone who was at the Clemson Super Regional was shocked. That game, however, is just the record for most tickets sold at Dudy Noble Field: 15,586.
There is no possible way you can pack more people into Dudy Noble Field than there were in 2007. The Hump was half full that day with people who were turned away and watched it on the video board.
Even though this Super Regional will be in the evening and even though State fans are excited there is no way the record could be broken because you cannot fit 15,000 human bodies between the gates of DNF.