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Bryant-Denny Stadium just before kickoff of the 2017 A-Day game.
(Michael Casagrande/mcasagrande@al.com)
It's been 10 years since Nick Saban's A-Day debut broke the scale on spring game attendance.
All 92,138 seats of the pre-expansion Bryant-Denny Stadium were filled that April 2007 afternoon. A decade later, the crowd didn't quite hit that number Saturday afternoon.
Alabama announced the crowd was 74,326 for the 2017 A-Day game. That is the ninth largest of in school history, but ranks third from the bottom in the Saban era. Thunderstorms were in the weather forecast, though rain didn't fall until after the game.
According to SB Nation's tracking of spring game attendance figures, Alabama's crowd was the third-largest of 2017 so far. Ohio State is No. 1 with 80,134 last week and Nebraska's 78,312 is second.
Before the game, Saban made his pitch for another big crowd on A-Day.
"I also think that because we set the standard here for how spring games sort of get evaluated because we had so many people -- and I've talked so many times about our first A-Day game here, which was 11 games ago -- the (91,000) people that were there sort of set the tone for being able to build something special, and that certainly is something that contributed to it.
"But because of that, now everybody tries to promote their spring game to get as big a crowd as they can as if that's going to be something that's going to help them promote the kind of energy and enthusiasm to catapult their program forward. Like everything else that we do, we want to do it better. We don't want to stay the same."
The 2017 number was down slightly from the 76,212 announced for last year's game. The 2011 attendance remains the program high with 92,310.
Before Saban arrived, the biggest A-Day crowd was 51,117 in 1988.
Alabama A-Day crowds
1. 92,300 in 2011
2. 92,138 in 2007
3. 91,312 in 2010
4. 84,050 in 2009
5. 78,526 in 2012
6. 78,315 in 2013
7. 78,200 in 2008
8. 76,212 in 2016
9. 74,326 in 2017
10. 73,506 in 2014
11. 65,175 in 2015
12. 51,117 in 1988