Spring football attendance: From Alabama's 92,310 to others' ... not as much

Most major-college football programs held their spring games Saturday. I thought about listing highlights of the games themselves, but what would that really prove?

Nebraska Coach Bo Pelini made it clear he was going to keep everything under wraps at the Red-White game in Lincoln, and did. "Plain vanilla" is the flavor du jour everywhere, and with good reason.

So I like to look at attendance figures to see who's got the passion for this stuff and who are content to wait for the real games in September.

Rotten weather knocked down attendance at Iowa and Iowa State. Iowa had an announced 23,500 last year in good weather, but Saturday's gusty, cold day held down the crowd to either 3,000 or 8,000 or somewhere in-between, depending on who you believed.

Iowa State had a press release saying 4,000 people were at its spring game. So 4,000 it is.

Penn State normally has a huge crowd for its spring game, but it was played in a driving rainstorm in State College, and was brought to a halt one series into the third quarter. The gathering was a mere 7,500. The weather was brutal at Northwestern, too, and the Chicago Tribune's account of the Wildcats' spring game said "a few hundred" attended.

Nebraska had "just" 66,784 for its Red-White Game after being in the 78,000-80,000 range the last few years.

Alabama had the largest spring throng for the second-straight year, with an announced 92,310. Nebraska was second.

Get this: Florida announced 53,000 for its spring game a week earlier. So Saturday, Florida State said its crowd was 53,818. They're a little competitive down there. Miami, meanwhile, claimed just 8,000.

Here are the figures I've tracked down from published reports. Many were estimates. Almost all, in fact.

BIG TEN

Nebraska 66,784

Michigan 25,000

Penn State 7,500

Iowa (see above)

Purdue 5,500

Indiana 2,564

Northwestern  "A few hundred"

Illinois, Michigan State, Minnesota, Ohio State and Wisconsin have yet to hold their spring games.

OTHERS

Alabama 92,310

Florida State 53,818

Florida 53,000

Auburn 52,290

Texas 45,000

Georgia 43,117

Arkansas 42,000

Mississippi State 36,357

South Carolina 30,103

Tennessee 29,451

Mississippi 28,000 (grossly inflated according to eyewitnesses)

Notre Dame 27,863

Oklahoma 25,598

LSU 25,302

Clemson 25,000

Texas A&M 16,500

Oklahoma State 16,000

Colorado 15,655

North Carolina 15,000

Boise State 14,445

North Carolina State 13,139

Utah 12,000

Texas Tech 12,000

Missouri 10,000

Miami (Fla.) 8,000

Vanderbilt 7,500

Central Florida 7,000

Stanford 6,800

BYU 5,500

TCU 5,000

Syracuse 4,750

Arizona 4,500

Washington State 4,076

Iowa State 4,000

Delaware 4,000

Louisville 3,500

UAB 2,500

Connecticut 2,500

South Florida 2,493

Southern Mississippi 2,476

Texas State 2,000

Pittsburgh 1,507 (rotten weather)

Western Kentucky 1,250

Akron 1,200

UNLV 750

Among those who haven't had spring games yet are Oregon, Virginia Tech, USC, Washington, UCLA and West Virginia.