AUBURN, Ala.
Auburn Athletic Director Jay Jacobs held a press conference today to correct an error made earlier this month in the announced attendance for Auburn's spring football game.
"It's a simple mistake, really," Jacobs said. "When the official press release was being written up someone left the final zero off of the attendance number. So, instead of having 31,757 fans at the game, we actually had 317,570."
Jacobs said that there had been no plans to correct the error by an official announcement until after the Alabama "A-Day" game on Saturday. "You know that here at Auburn we don't like to toot our own horn, and we were going to let the matter drop. But, when Alabama claimed to have had three times as many people at their spring game as we did, well, we had to set the record straight."
Jacobs was quick to discount reports that Jordan-Hare Stadium was actually less than half full on the day of the scrimmage. "Let me tell you, I was there and I know what I saw," he said vehemently. He also discounted photos taken at the game that seemed to show thousands of empty seats. "You can do a lot with cameras and angles. People play the same trick at our regular season games all the time. You learn to ignore it after a while."
Jacobs' final comments came after one attendee mentioned that Jordan-Hare Stadium's maximum capacity is listed as 87,451. "That is true, but that doesn't take into account the spirit of the Auburn nation," Jacobs replied. "Here at Auburn we practice what we like to call 'Auburn Math.' In Auburn Math two numbers that seem different may actually be the same, like how Alabama actually has twelve national championships but we say they have seven. So that's how we fit 300,000 people into an 87,000 seat stadium. That and quantum mechanics."
Auburn Athletic Director Jay Jacobs held a press conference today to correct an error made earlier this month in the announced attendance for Auburn's spring football game.
"It's a simple mistake, really," Jacobs said. "When the official press release was being written up someone left the final zero off of the attendance number. So, instead of having 31,757 fans at the game, we actually had 317,570."
Jacobs said that there had been no plans to correct the error by an official announcement until after the Alabama "A-Day" game on Saturday. "You know that here at Auburn we don't like to toot our own horn, and we were going to let the matter drop. But, when Alabama claimed to have had three times as many people at their spring game as we did, well, we had to set the record straight."
Jacobs was quick to discount reports that Jordan-Hare Stadium was actually less than half full on the day of the scrimmage. "Let me tell you, I was there and I know what I saw," he said vehemently. He also discounted photos taken at the game that seemed to show thousands of empty seats. "You can do a lot with cameras and angles. People play the same trick at our regular season games all the time. You learn to ignore it after a while."
Jacobs' final comments came after one attendee mentioned that Jordan-Hare Stadium's maximum capacity is listed as 87,451. "That is true, but that doesn't take into account the spirit of the Auburn nation," Jacobs replied. "Here at Auburn we practice what we like to call 'Auburn Math.' In Auburn Math two numbers that seem different may actually be the same, like how Alabama actually has twelve national championships but we say they have seven. So that's how we fit 300,000 people into an 87,000 seat stadium. That and quantum mechanics."
