2016 NCAA Championship Game 4th-Highest Attended Game in History

  0 Braden Keith | December 18th, 2016 | Big 12, Big Ten, College - Women's Indoor, News, Pac 12

Even with no local teams in the final 4, 17,345 fans packed into Columbus’ Nationwide Arena for Saturday evening’s championship game between the Stanford Cardinal and Texas Longhorns. That’s the 4th-largest crowd to ever see an NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball event. That’s about an 88.9% capacity of the ascribed 19,500 seats available in the arena.

While neither the semi-finals nor the finals drew as big of a crowd as last year’s did in the smaller CenturyLink Arena, last year had more working in its favor. Besides being in the volleyball-mad heartland of the country, the final 4 featured a game between Kansas and Nebraska. Lincoln is only like a 60 mile drive to Creighton, and Lawrence isn’t too much further away.

In fact, before Saturday night’s game, the CentruyLink Center had hosted the 5 highest-attended games in NCAA history, showing just how big the sport is in Nebraska.

Notably, this was the most-attended game in NCAA history that didn’t include Nebraska, though Texas has been involved now in each of the top 4.

Note: in final 4 scenarios, where games are played back-to-back, fans get two games for the same ticket, and as such attendance is accounted as a single number for the two games.

The top-10 games/game groups of all-time:

ATTENDANCE MATCHES MATCHUP CITY DATE
17,561 2015 NCAA final Nebraska vs Texas Omaha, NE Dec 19, 2015
17,551 2015 NCAA semifinals Nebraska vs Kansas
Texas vs Minnesota
Omaha, NE Dec 17, 2015
17,430 2008 NCAA semifinals Stanford vs Texas
Penn State vs Nebraska
Omaha, NE Dec 18, 2008
17,345 2016 NCAA final Stanford vs. Texas Columbus, OH Dec 17, 2016
17,209 2006 NCAA final Nebraska vs Stanford Omaha, NE Dec 16, 2006
17,014 2006 NCAA semifinals Nebraska vs UCLA
Stanford vs Washington
Omaha, NE Dec 14, 2006
16,670 2016 NCAA semifinals Stanford vs Minnesota
Texas vs Nebraska
Columbus, OH Dec 15, 2016
16,448 2012 NCAA final Texas vs Oregon Louisville, KY Dec 15, 2012
16,119 2005 NCAA regional final Nebraska vs Florida Omaha, NE Dec 10, 2005
15,945 UNC vs Maryland UNC vs Maryland Chapel Hill, NC Oct 25, 2013
14,975 2013 NCAA semifinals Penn State vs Washington Seattle, WA Dec 19, 2013

 

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About Braden Keith

Braden Keith

Braden Keith is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of VolleyMob.com. Braden's first foray into sports journalism came in 2010, when he launched a swimming website called The Swimmers' Circle. Two years later, he joined SwimSwam.com as a co-founder. Long huge fans of volleyball, when Braden and the SwimSwam partners sought an opportunity to …

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