Yea, I can't see any reason why we'd intentionally under-report attendance during regular season games. I could maaaabye (barely) see a reason to do it in the postseason, since a portion of the money the NCAA gets from host teams can be related to ticket sales, but there's no reason to do that in the regular season.
I'm gonna have to check out some of the photos from the game and try to estimate myself. It's possible it was a bit more sparse on the east side than what I was originally guessing, since it's hard to judge when you're in the middle of it, but the west side was the most packed I'd seen it in quite a few years. If our stadium does actually hold 16k fans...there's no way that was less than 10k. I don't know how to fix it, but they need to get much better at counting attendance.
Also, for any NAU fans who may still stop by, here's a bit that I wrote about the game over on AGS:
I thought that, overall, Northern Arizona's offense did really well. Anyone that doesn't get a ton of pressure on Cookus is going to have a really bad day. That was the one thing we were able to do to shut them down in the second half. Pressure on the QB, couple of sacks, and stopping the run game. They're a very talented team overall.
Another thing to consider is that three of our offensive players had "career" or "near-career" days. That wasn't so much due to NAU's defense, which seemed pretty decent...not like NDSU, but solid enough...but everything was just going right for us on the offensive side of the ball. The way that McGuire, Lenoir, Lesure (he's the sophomore version of Lenior), and McShane were playing yesterday, very few teams could have stopped them. Lenoir was just catching everything within 10 feet of him, Lesure looks like he should be playing basketball with his ability to get up to catch the ball or hurdle defenders, and McShane...well...it's still very early in the season obviously, but through two games, he's currently leading the FCS in rushing yards (by 80 yards) and is 3rd overall in DI (and only 17 yards behind #1) although he'll probably lose a bit of ground this next weekend since it's our "bye" week.
I have a lot of respect for NAU and they did a very good job considering everything, but everything was just going Western's way yesterday.
We played exceptionally well yesterday (hopefully that's a "trend" rather than an "outlier"...considering McShane's performances so far...I'm considering it a "trend" until proven otherwise). If we play that well in two weeks, I think we beat Northern Illinois by about the same margin (reserving any real predictions until I see their game next week though).
Though the big "Air Fog" fans had to be on there as well.
Scott Lawson - Board Admin
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