For my research project, one of the factors I decided to consider is a comparison between the OSU Football team's win/loss record and attendance at home games. If boring explanations get to you, skip to the bottom for the quick version. Everyone knows that seasons during which the team is doing well, attendance spikes, and likewise, after losing seasons attendance drops, right? I knew that the correlation had to be there, but just "knowing" the answer does not make any conclusion valid, so I did some number crunching, and I found a mildly surprising result. Based on data from Oregon State between 1946 and 1988, while attendance did tend to fluctuate in accordance with the wins percentage, the overall trend had relatively little impact. Apart from a spike during 1968 (the year after a Rose Bowl season), a spike which did not happen after the previous Rose Bowl season (1957), attendance actually stayed fairly consistent, with a gradual upward trend. Of course, it had its highs and lows, but generally those highs and lows fit the form of a gradual increase. For comparison, here are two graphs I made. (I don't have good software installed on my Mac yet, so you'll have to pardon that I don't have the graphs on a single image and that the images need to be cropped--click on the images for a bigger version.) The first graph shows the average home attendance (though as some "home" games were played in Portland's Civic Stadium, I included separate statistics for averages with and without the Portland games), while the second shows the percentage of wins in the season (wins only, no ties).
The quick version:
Average attendance at home games increased over time even though the W/L ratio generally decreased over time. Results of an individual season often result in a spike or dip in attendance, but not enough to impact the overall trend, with the exception of the 1967 Rose Bowl team.
Special thanks to the OSU Sports Information office for granting me access to its "archive," from whence the 1989 Football Media Guide supplying my data came.
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