2017 attendance for Cal Football was among the worst in the Pac-12—and in recent school history

Unless we’re talking about the football blue bloods like the Alabama Crimson Tide or the Ohio State Buckeyes, most fans of college football understand that it’s mostly mercurial. Trash talking other schools is part of the game, but we understand that no team will forever be better than another (I say in the midst of a historic win streak for the Stanfurd Cardinal in the Big Game). And yet, despite the cyclic nature of on-field quality, there are a few things we can always count on as fans of the California Golden Bears regarding our most-hated of rivals. There’s still no Stanfurdium. They barely have a fanbase and they can’t draw a crowd. Stanfurd students get As handed to them—much like they’ve had everything handed to them their entire lives. Except... one of these things isn’t really true anymore. (And I’m not sure why I’m trying to build suspense when the post title clues you in.)

Attendance figures for the 2017 NCAA Football season have been released and California Memorial Stadium was among the lowest-attended in the Pac-12. In fact, the only schools with lower attendance were the Oregon State Beavers and the Washington State Cougars—not exactly rarefied air to be among. But those two schools actually did better than Cal when taking into consideration stadium size—they both sold over 80% of their seats. Cal couldn’t even sell 60% of Memorial Stadium’s seats this past year.

Cal was just a tad below the FBS average, which makes us feel better... until we realize how much those numbers are skewed by smaller schools and Group of Five teams. The only Pac-12 teams to beat the actual Power Five average were the USC Trojans and the Washington Huskies.

But the worst news of all is that Stanfurd roughly outsold Cal by 11,000 seats per game. Worse yet, Stanfurd sold nearly 95% of the seats in their sad little dilapidated stadium. It took the (sigh) emergence of the school as a football powerhouse, multiple conference championships and seasons with 10+ wins, and a handful of Heisman hopefuls, but Stanfurd has outdrawn Cal (as we are mired in a streak of mediocrity—at best—and coming out of a 5-win season).

2017 was really bad for Cal. Not only were we arguably the worst team for attendance in the Pac-12, but it was possibly our worst year for ticket sales in the past 15 years.

We’ve known that ticket sales for Cal have been dropping, but 2017 was a starkly bad year—the worst that I could find in NCAA records—with figures similar to Tedford’s second year, when the fanbase was recovering from the Holmoecaust. Our 2017 raw attendance per game was lower than that year (2002), but the percent of stadium fullness was a tad higher. Cal’s best attendance per game on record was in 2006, when Cal was co–Pac-10 champions and ended up winning 10 games. Since that point, Cal basically declined annually (omitting a big bump the year we returned to Memorial after our one-year excursion to AT&T Park)—with a minor bump in 2015 when we thought Jared Goff might be our savior. In 2017, our ticket sales dropped by over 20% compared to 2016; again, this is the largest drop we’ve seen in this timeframe (with the exception of the precipitous drop to squeeze into the smaller AT&T Park). The only other year that had a double-digit percent decrease over the previous year was 2013; the sample size is small, but these two years with double-digit attendance drops came in the first years of our past two head coaches. Perhaps this is some protest by the fans for the poor performance of the outgoing head coach (presumably performing poorly enough to get fired) or apprehension about the new head coach.

The stadium debt has been discussed at length here, so I think we all know that Cal cannot afford (literally or figuratively) more years with this level of ticket sales. With Cal fans generally feeling optimistic about Justin Wilcox’s future, I expect to see sales improve again, but we’ll see if we can ever break into the top 30 nationally again.