schools are talking about tickets sold when they say a game was a sellout. It doesn't matter how many butts actually ended up in the seats if they sold tickets for every seat. It is quite possible to sell more tickets than seats if you have unassigned seats for certain tickets, such as student passes. I remember being a student at BYU and not being able to find a seat at a few football games because there were already more students on each row than there were seats.