Exploring how attendance patterns relate to university size, conference affiliation, and team performance.
This project analyzes Division I college football attendance using institutional enrollment data, win percentage, conference membership, and team branding metadata. By merging attendance data from CFBStats with demographic information from IPEDS, the study examines whether win percentage, university size, or conference affiliation help explain the significant variation in home-game turnout.
Visualizations—including scatterplots with team logos, enrollment violin plots, bar charts, and conference-level comparisons—show that while enrollment and winning percentage correlate with attendance, conference identity and long-term football culture are far stronger drivers. Power Five teams consistently outperform their structural predictors, while Group of Five teams exhibit limited attendance variation regardless of size.
Full code, data cleaning steps, visualizations, and notebook files are available here:
View GitHub Repository