Clemson football ‘stunk’ last year. Here’s how it impacted home game attendance
Clemson was one of college football’s most disappointing teams in 2025.
Those season-long struggles resulted in a modest but noticeable drop in fan support at Memorial Stadium, according to attendance data reviewed by The State.
Clemson announced a total attendance of 553,996 people across seven home games last year at Memorial Stadium, which seats 81,500 people. That comes out to an average of 79,142 people per game, which was a top 15 number nationally.
But Clemson’s total attendance and average football attendance numbers in 2025 were its worst for a single season in 14 years — and ticket scan data obtained via public records request reveals how fan support waned throughout the year.
Ticket scan data isn’t always a perfect measure of the sheer number of people who attended a game, and Clemson’s numbers aren’t an outlier nationally. But the records add additional context to announced attendance numbers.
Here’s a closer look at the data from a trying 7-6 football season.
How ticket scans dropped from 2024 to 2025
Announced attendance for a college sports event is a broad measure. It covers not just the fans but university and event staff, media, bands, cheerleaders and team personnel — essentially everyone on site for a game.
Although announced attendance is the national standard for tracking and what the NCAA uses in its records, ticket scan data offers a better measure of how many fans bought and redeemed tickets at the game.
In 2024, Clemson athletics reported 419,299 total ticket scans across seven home games. That season, the Tigers went 5-2 at home, won the ACC championship and reached the College Football Playoff for the first time since 2020.
Ticket scans represented 74.1% of Clemson’s total attendance in 2024.
Across the same number of games in 2025, Clemson reported 392,460 total ticket scans — which was 26,839 fewer ticket scans than the previous year. That 6.4% percentage decrease in ticket scans coincided with Clemson’s first losing record at home since 1998 (3-4) and its worst overall record since 2010 (7-6).
Ticket scans represented 70.9% of Clemson’s total attendance in 2025, a 3.2% drop.
Going off announced attendance numbers, Clemson’s 2025 total attendance and per-game attendance were also its lowest in a single football season since 2011, excluding the 2020 COVID-affected season and the 2021 season when Clemson only played six home games instead of its usual seven.
The Tigers had a total attendance of 545,713 at Memorial Stadium in 2011 and an average attendance of 77,959 across seven games that season. Clemson’s average attendance has only been below 80,000 twice since then (2021, 2025).
Ticket scans dropped after LSU game, records show
Ticket scan numbers aren’t a perfect way to gauge fan support because weather, faulty equipment and other factors can put gate checkers in a spot where they’re visually checking for tickets instead of scanning them. Naturally, those scans (or lack thereof) don’t show up in schools’ totals.
Still, Clemson’s data shows some interesting trends during the 2025 season.
The Tigers’ Aug. 30 home opener against LSU was announced as a sellout, and scanned ticket numbers back it up. Clemson reported a whopping 70,812 tickets scanned for that marquee non-conference game and AP Top 10 matchup. It was the most scans for any of Clemson’s 14 home games from 2024-25.
Ticket-redeeming fans — a group that includes general admission tickets, student tickets, suite/club tickets and tickets for university employees who are attending but not working the game — made up 86.9% of the crowd in Death Valley that night.
After Clemson’s 17-10 loss to LSU, though, scanned ticket numbers steadily dropped before making a comeback for a home night game vs. Florida State.
That’s partially because the school’s next two home games at Memorial Stadium against Troy and Syracuse both featured a roughly 90-minute lightning delay.
Home games later in the season were also impacted, though. Clemson’s Nov. 1 loss to Duke was arguably the low point of the season, as the Tigers allowed a touchdown and two-point conversion in the final minute and dropped to 3-5 and 2-4 in the ACC.
Clemson reported an attendance of 75,809 people for the Duke game, which was the Tigers’ sixth-straight home loss to a power conference team.
But the number of formal ticket scans for the game was 46,329 — 38.9% lower than Clemson’s reported number. Fans made up just 61.1% of the crowd that afternoon, and the Duke game (a noon kickoff the day after Halloween) generated the fewest ticket scans for any Clemson home game over the past two years.
Dabo takes ownership for season: ‘I did a horrible job’
Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney has long said he enjoys working at a school where expectations are high.
When fans booed his team off the field at halftime of back-to-back home games in September, he didn’t blink and later quipped: “I was booing with them.”
Swinney has also taken full ownership for the team’s poor 2025 season, which was the Tigers’ worst record since they finished 6-7 in Swinney’s second season in 2010.
“We stunk last year,” Swinney said earlier this week on “The Jim Rome Show.” “I screwed it all up. I did a horrible job. I mean, we had way better players than what our record ended up being.”
Attendance-wise, the numbers weren’t all bad.
Despite a 6.4% drop in tickets scanned, Clemson still ranked No. 16 in total attendance and No. 15 in average attendance among all schools in 2025 and drew the most fans per game in the ACC, ahead of national runner-up Miami. The Tigers have also finished among the country’s top 20 in home attendance 45 years in a row.
Of course, those rankings are derived from announced attendance, not ticket scan data. Per FOIAball’s David Covucci, Clemson’s 2025 discrepancy between announced attendance and ticket scans was generally in line with other schools.
Comparable power conference programs including Oregon, Tennessee, Louisville and Texas A&M also had games with discrepancies of about 20% to 30%. The Tigers’ weather-affected games vs. Troy and Syracuse played a role, too.
On the heels of a disappointing season, though, Clemson also saw a noticeable drop in spring game attendance last month.
Swinney always encourages fans to show up to Memorial Stadium for the event and create a game-like atmosphere. But the 2026 iteration of the Tigers’ annual Orange & White Game, which was free to attend, drew an estimated 25,000 fans on March 28.
That’s a dip from 35,000 fans in 2025, 47,000 fans in 2024 and 50,000 fans in 2023.
This story was originally published April 16, 2026 at 12:32 PM.
