So yeah, Seattle won the big pointyball game, and lots of people came out for a parade to celebrate. But are we surprised to learn that parade organizers overestimated the crowd size?

“There is civic pride that goes into estimating these numbers. They tend to be overstated wildly,” says Steve Doig, the Knight Chair in Journalism at Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, who has covered the subject of crowd estimation.

“Or maybe it’s from a cop who looks around and says, ‘My God, there must be 700,000 people here.’?”

Previous Inkstain coverage of crowd size estimates here.