A small-town NC college football team drew larger crowds than an NFL team in 2017 | Raleigh News & Observer

Appalachian State University repeated as the home-game attendance leader in the Sun Belt Conference for the 2017 football season. But it also did something more impressive.

The Mountaineers from Boone drew a larger average home-game crowd than one NFL team did – something school officials were proud to point out on Wednesday.

Both the Mountaineers’ Kidd Brewer Stadium and the StubHub Center, the home of the Los Angeles Chargers and the LA Galaxy team in Major League Soccer, offer 30,000 seats.

The Chargers, which moved from San Diego back to their original home of Los Angeles last year, will call the venue in Carson, Calif., home again for the 2018 season.

The Chargers averaged 25,335 in attendance at home games in 2017, according to ESPN – nearly 28,000 fewer than the next-lowest average home attendance in the NFL, in Cincinnati.

A report Wednesday from Appalachian State noted that the team’s average attendance of 25,787 for home football games in 2017 was greater than for several other college football teams – and more than the Chargers, which are led by former N.C. State University quarterback Philip Rivers.

Social media was quick to latch on to the stat. A post in the college football subreddit had nearly 10,000 upvotes and several hundred comments by Thursday afternoon, including some allusions to a huge Mountaineers victory people have yet to forget.