LINCOLN -- The Saturday night stage, a rivalry game featuring a celebrity coach and the eventual Heisman Trophy winner, and a team in red looking for revenge.
Nebraska's 28-10 win over Colorado and coach Deion Sanders served both as NU's most-viewed game of the season on TV and potentially the best-attended game in five years, according to scanned ticket data provided by NU's athletic department Thursday.
While announced attendance data -- which pairs paid tickets with coaches, players, media, game officials and other stadium personnel -- routinely puts NU's attendance at games in the upper 80,000s for recent seasons, Nebraska also keeps track of how many fan tickets are scanned as they enter the stadium gates. It provides an additional layer of insight at fan attendance.
That data shows 79,105 fans had tickets scanned for the CU game, the much-anticipated contest watched by 6.3 million viewers on NBC. NU extracted revenge its 2023 loss in Boulder. Fans stormed the field afterward in celebration.
The 79,105 total is the fourth-highest scanned ticket attendance number among all Husker home games since 2014, when The World-Herald first started collecting scanned ticket data. The high-water mark remains NU's 2016 win over Oregon (80,865), followed by Scott Frost's debut in 2018 against Colorado (80,654) and the Huskers 2019 loss to Ohio State (79,502) that featured a visit by ESPN's College GameDay.
Nebraska's 2024 season average of 73,324 scanned tickets per game is 7,634 more scanned tickets per game than the 2023 home slate and 8,452 more per game than the 2022 home slate. The 2024 average is also the highest since the 2016 season, when the Huskers last won nine games and finished their season at home undefeated. In 2024, six of NU's seven games had scanned ticket totals higher than 70,000 -- again, for the first time since 2016 -- with the season-ending Wisconsin game as the low at 69,982.
The Friday night loss to Illinois didn't hurt the Huskers' gate -- that game finished second in scanned tickets with 76,680. That total was higher than any scanned ticket total in the 2022 or 2023 seasons, and just 22 short of the 76,702 scanned tickets for Nebraska's memorable 2021 loss to eventual Big Ten champion Michigan.
A sluggish win over Northern Iowa had 74,474 scanned tickets, followed by UTEP (71,606), Rutgers (71,146), UCLA (70,276) and Wisconsin.
The 2024 games represent six of the top 10 and seven of the top 13 scanned ticket totals in the last four seasons.
In 2020, Big Ten COVID-related rules allowed only select family and friends to attend games, leaving attendance figures below 1,000.
Here are the last four seasons of home games, ranked by scanned ticket totals given by Nebraska's athletic department:
1. 2024 Colorado 79,105
2. 2021 Michigan 76,702
3. 2024 Illinois 76,680
4. 2022 Oklahoma 75,051
5. 2024 Northern Iowa 74,474
6. 2023 No Illinois 73,339
7. 2024 UTEP 71,606
8. 2024 Rutgers 71,146
9. 2021 Iowa 70,739
10. 2024 UCLA 70,276
11. 2023 Michigan 70,064
12. 2022 Indiana 70,019
13. 2024 Wisconsin 69,982
14. 2023 Northwestern 69,940
15. 2022 North Dakota 69,772
16. 2021 Northwestern 69,500
17. 2022 Georgia Southern 68,238
18. 2022 Illinois 66,681
19. 2023 La Tech 66,287
20. 2021 Purdue 65,286
21. 2023 Maryland 64,352
22. 2023 Iowa 62,366
23. 2021 Fordham 62,094
24. 2021 Ohio State 60,833
25. 2021 Buffalo 60,790
26. 2022 Minnesota 57,730
27. 2023 Purdue 54,866
28. 2022 Wisconsin 46,613
Photos: Our favorite photos from the 2024 Nebraska football season