Syracuse football: comparing Friday versus Saturday attendance, the sequel

A new Syracuse Orange football season begins just over a week from now. Before the 2026 campaign gets underway, we want to revisit a topic that had plenty of our TNIAAM readers talking: home attendance. Specifically, an oddity in this year’s schedule that fans haven’t seen in quite some time.

To recap, the 2026 Syracuse slate doesn’t include a home game on a Friday. It’s the first time this has happened in over a decade (2013). After the Orange’s schedule was confirmed, we dove into all the attendance numbers to see how Friday games typically compare to Saturday homers in the JMA Wireless Dome, identify any trends, etc. You can check out that initial story here.

That said, we heard from you and got good feedback to get better results, equal points of comparison, and draw more precise conclusions.

So we’re going back to swimming in 60+ home games’ worth of attendance data, dates, and kickoff times to do just that. Using your suggestions, here is what we found.

Acknowledging Homecoming and Family Weekend Games

One valid critique of our initial exercise: not clarifying which games occurred during two points of the year that typically draw higher attendance for football games at Syracuse University: homecoming and family weekends.

So we went back and found when home games took place during those particular weekends. Here’s the full list between 2015 and 2025:

Of note, of the 20 combined homecoming and family weekends, only three happened on a Friday: Clemson in 2017, Pittsburgh in 2019, and Boston College in 2023 (all of which were on SU’s Family Weekend).

After identifying that, there are a few new takeaways to point out:

1. Those weekends certainly affected attendance. Over the last 10 years (not including 2020 due to the pandemic), family weekend/homecoming home games have accounted for five of the top-10 most attended home games during this period. These home games also hold 10 of the spots in the top-15.
2. Acknowledging the aforementioned small sample size with the Friday and Saturday family weekend/homecoming games, the three Friday games ranked 5th, 11th, and 12th out of the 65 total home games over the last 10 years.
3. Averaging all 17 family weekend/homecoming Saturday home games, the total comes out to 38,274 per contest. That number is 22nd-most looking at the entire 60-plus-game list. While there were some notable highs, some Saturday family weekend/homecoming games did pretty badly compared to the rest of the field. Seven of the 18 (roughly 39%) ranked in the bottom half of the entire list.
4. The three Friday family weekend/homecoming games had an average attendance of 43,681, which ranks 7th out of the whole 65-game list. Again, it bears repeating: the Saturday games tend to have bigger extremes on both ends, and the Friday sample size is much smaller.
5. Excluding all weekend/homecoming games, your new top-10 in attendance features eight Saturday games and two Friday games. Of note, eight of these ten games were against conference opponents (the two exceptions: Western Michigan in 2019 and UConn in 2025). Also of note, all but one game in the top-10 (Miami in 2024, which was still pretty packed due to the stakes), regardless of day, kicked off either at noon or in the evening (7 pm, 7:30 pm, or 8 pm).

Looking back at what’s left on the remaining list of 45 games (now excluding the 20 homecoming/family weekend games), Friday home games have:

• Two of the top-10 spots
• Four of the top-20 spots
• But… out of the bottom half of the list (23 games), the Friday games have six games. Of note, the four worst-attended Friday games were non-con opponents: Colgate in 2016, Central Connecticut St. in 2017, Rhode Island in 2015, and Liberty in 2021.
• Of the 11 Friday homers on the 45-game list, seven of the best 11 were all ACC games, with the one exception being Colgate in 2025.

Revisiting all the totals, the Friday games were better than the average for an entire season six times out of 14 instances if the Family Weekend and Homecoming games are included.

Without them, it’s only three times.

More like-for-like comparisons

Simply put: we needed to do a better job at comparing an Orange to an Orange (#brand), instead of comparing an Orange to a cheeseburger.

Examples include: FCS games on Friday versus Saturday, ACC games on Friday versus Saturday. Equal weight between all games versus a single opponent. Making those same comparisons, both including and not including homecoming/family weekend games.

So let’s do just that.

There have been 14 total Friday home games between 2015 and 2025 (excluding 2020). Four were FCS games: Colgate (twice), Central Connecticut St., and Rhode Island. Of the remaining 51 Saturday home games on the board, six were against FCS opponents: Holy Cross and Wagner (both twice), Colgate, and UAlbany. Of note, half these games happened during either homecoming or family weekend.

Let’s start with the straight-up Friday against Saturday, all FCS games (to clarify, none of these happened on Family Weekend or Homecoming):

• Friday avg. attendance: 33,742
• Saturday avg. attendance: 34,903

Moving to the FBS home games, we also wanted to show you all the opponents over the last 10 years that Syracuse has played at least twice, once on Friday and once on Saturday — same drill as earlier of acknowledging those special weekends at SU.

Surprisingly, that’s happened sparingly over the last 10 years. Syracuse has played just six opponents on both days at some point in the last decade. Colgate is the only FCS team on the list. The rest are in the conference: Boston College, Clemson, Louisville, North Carolina, and Pittsburgh.

Here’s the summary for each of those instances:

• Boston College: six home games in the last 10 years, one on Friday. Friday game was second-best on the list, but it was on Family Weekend. Highest-attended year: 2019 (42,857). Average attendance for all BC games: 35,078.
• Clemson: five home games in the last 10 years, two on Friday. One Friday game (2017, Family Weekend) placed second out of five; the other (2021) was five out of five. Highest-attended year: 2019 (50,248). Average attendance for all Clemson games: 41,420.
• Colgate: three home games in the last 10 years, two on Friday. Friday in 2025 and 2016 ranked first and third out of three, respectively. Highest-attended year: 2025 (37,372). Average attendance for all Colgate games: 33,724.
• Louisville: two home games in the last 10 years, both on Friday. Average attendance for all Louisville games: 37,491.
• North Carolina: two home games in the last 10 years, one on Friday. 2025 (Friday game) edged 2018 (Saturday game). Average attendance for all North Carolina games: 36,197.
• Pittsburgh: four home games in the last 10 years, one on Friday, which ranked first out of four, but happened on Family Weekend. Highest-attended year: 2019 (44,886). Average attendance for all Pitt games: 36,722.

Regarding Friday games, three were in the top 15 of all 65 home games in the last decade. The trio (Pittsburgh in 2019, Boston College in 2023, and Clemson in 2017) were all conference opponents, and also notably on either Family or Homecoming Weekend.

Comparing Friday and Saturday attendance without the 2021 season

Simply put: things were still not quite “back to normal” for Syracuse as well as the rest of the college football world.

Even the numbers clearly show that. Of the bottom-15 games out of the 65 home games in the last 10 years (again, no 2020), a third of them happened in 2021 alone. The sample also includes a bit of everything: Friday and Saturday homers, non-con and conference opponents.

So, what happens if we take that year out of the equation entirely? How does that affect the Friday vs. Saturday comparisons?

Doing so leaves us with a list of 58 Orange home games over the last decade, 11 of which (nearly one in five) happened on Friday.

Here’s how the Friday games did:

• 2019 Pitt remains No. 5 on the list.
• Three additional Friday games crack the top 15: Louisville in 2018, BC in 2023, and Clemson in 2017 (10th, 11th, and 12th overall).
• Three more Friday games made it into the top half of the 58-game list: Stanford in 2024 (20th), Colgate in 2025 (26th), and North Carolina in 2025 (28th).
• There were three Friday games in the bottom 11.

After revisiting this exercise and drowning myself in years’ worth of attendance data, there are some good lessons to be learned, and certainly to keep an eye on for future scheduling implications.

I think it’s fair to say in an average year, Friday and Saturday games can be similar-ish. Saturday definitely has the larger sample size, so drawing clear conclusions can be a tough road (look at us focusing on this topic on two different pieces, 2,000 words each).

I definitely think there is value in Friday night games if they happen during Family Weekend and Homecoming Weekend, especially if it’s an ACC opponent. It doesn’t always have to be the Clemsons of the world, either.

Of the top-25 total home games by attendance between 2015 and 2025 (no 2020 or 2021), almost half (12) happened during one of these special weekends. So, to an extent, there are legit consequences for picking which weekend as the theme for a certain home game on the schedule. The numbers clearly show that.

This is also an exercise which has its limitations, quite frankly. Optimism in the program, how the season is going, the state of the team, ticket prices, and so much more could factor into the equation. The 2025 Duke game was the sixth-most attended game of the last decade, but ‘Cuse had just beaten Clemson and gotten to a 3-1 start. From there, the entire season went off the rails. Attendance followed suit.

Looking ahead, 2026 will be very interesting to see if it bucks any of the trends above. Notre Dame is on the schedule as a home game, but very late in the year. Clemson and Louisville are your headliners for Family and Homecoming Weekends, and the attendance situation with the former of those opponents being a past topic of discussion among the TNIAAM team.