The first year or so of playoffs would no doubt make a big splash. And I suppose that if a team made the playoffs for the first time (or first time in a while), fans would be excited. But if a program is actually good enough to go to the playoffs on at least a semi-regular basis, would the bloom come off the rose?
To answer my own question, I suppose that's why most proposals have at least the early playoff games played on someone's campus.
Can't imagine the blood would come off the rose more than it would for a team going to Vegas or Shreveport for a bowl every year.
But the flip side is at the D1-A level would we get many tickets to a road playoff game outside of a standard 2-3k allotment? If not even if someone doesn't go to every playoff game I'm sure we'd sell out a small road allotment like that. And for the home playoff games I'd expect most season ticket holders to make it and a big bump in sales to non season ticket holders.
I would expect that the visitor allotment would be about what it is during the regular season, which is fitting since the point of giving the higher ranked team a home game is to give them the home field advantage.
As far as the attendance at FCS playoff games, for the 2009 season, the average for all FCS home games was 8,025. Attendance for the 15 playoff games averaged 10,262 with attendance at the championship game being 14,328. To put that in perspective, the top drawing FCS team in 2009 was Montana which averaged 24,417 at home. Penn was no. 30 in FCS home attendance at 10,600. So the playoffs averaged 27.8% higher than the overall home attendance for the FCS and the championship game attendance was 44% higher than the overall average. The playoffs averaged about Penn did which was 30th in attendance.
FBS average home attendance was 45,545 in 2009. Bowl game average attendance was 52,055. There is no NCAA championship game so the NCAA site doesn't break out attendance for the BCS-NC game. The top FBS team in home attendance was Michigan 108,933 and no. 30 on the home attendance list was Cal at 59,472. Bowl game attendance was 14.3% higher than overall average attendance. No. 30 in attendance in the FBS averaged 14.2% more than than the bowl games.
Since the FCS doesn't have bowl games and the FBS doesn't have a playoff, I don't know that you can draw any conclusions from the FCS attendance numbers for the playoffs, in some respects it comes down to the schools that are playing. Michigan averaged over 108,000 for a team that went 5-7 in 2009. Clearly if they were playing a playoff game at UM it would put over 100,000 in the stands. By contrast (not that I think Eastern Michigan would ever be hosting a playoff game) but they averaged 5,016 in home attendance in 2009. Having that kind of disparity is hard to reconcile.
