Spring games have become more and more of an event over the past few years, and it has drawn more and more fans to the stadiums.

The Mercury News' Jon Wilner took a look at reported attendances at different college football spring games and compared them to one another and came up with a pretty surprising conclusion.

"It’s not the only measure of passion -- and passion means ratings and market penetration and advertising dollars for the networks -- but it’s a pretty darn good one," Wilner wrote. "Nobody should expect the Pac-12 to draw at SEC and B1G levels, but the difference is more striking than you might think."

The SEC and Big Ten own the top nine spots and were the only two conferences in which more than 45,000 fans showed up for spring games. The top school was Ohio State, which pulled in 100,189 fans for its spring game and broke its own record for fan attendance that it set at last year's spring game.

Wilner projected the Ducks' attendance at 36,000 (Oregon will play its spring game this Saturday), which would be the most for any conference school. The Los Angeles schools were the next most popular for Pac-12 spring games, though UCLA was quite a ways behind USC.

Here's a breakdown of where the Pac-12 schools fall:

11. Oregon -- 36,000

18. USC -- 23,000

27. UCLA -- 8,000

28. Utah -- 6,300

30. Colorado -- 5,100

33. Washington State -- 4,129

34. Stanford -- 2,500

35. Cal -- 2,000

36. Arizona -- 1,500