The final numbers are in on police citations during the 2003 football season - and police say it was a boisterous one.

During the seven Saturdays when the football team took to the field at Spartan Stadium, MSU police arrested 405 people on campus, mostly for alcohol-related disruptions, such as disorderly conduct and underage drinking.

On average, police arrested nearly 40 percent more people per game than in 2002, when 291 citations were issued during eight football Saturdays.

MSU police Sgt. Florene McGlothian-Taylor said last year's numbers were particularly low, especially after 2001, when police arrested 521 people - an average of 74 per game.

"You expect people to drink and so forth during football games," McGlothian-Taylor said, calling this year's statistics "more in line with a typical football season."

And this year's tally included numbers from the Nov. 1 match-up at Spartan Stadium against Michigan, which accounted for 138 arrests - nearly 40 percent of the season total.

"If we hadn't played Michigan at home, we probably would have been a lot lower," McGlothian-Taylor said.

This season, MSU police employed additional Greencoats - student security staff - to patrol campus buildings on game days. As in previous years, students in the greek system were responsible for managing their own gatherings near the rock on Farm Lane.

"The fraternities did a good job of policing themselves," McGlothian-Taylor said. "It would be nice if more people did that."

City and campus leaders said most members of the community made efforts to behave when celebrating the success of the football team, which finished 8-4.

Special efforts were made to prevent destructive behavior after the MSU-U-M game. Leaders are hopeful that the spirit of that big game will continue into the spring, when the men's basketball team shoots for the NCAA National Championship.

"Hopefully, we'll see in the spring what we saw in the fall, which is people doing the right thing," said Kevin Glandon, vice-chairperson for external affairs of ASMSU, MSU's undergraduate student government.

"If we do well in the spring, I think we'll be paying a lot of attention to the same types of actions."

After the men's run in the NCAA Tournament last March, police arrested more than 30 people during the March 28-30 disturbances, which caused about $40,000 in damage.

East Lansing police Capt. Juli Liebler said behavior during the football games improved each week in the city. Aside from Welcome Weekend and the Michigan game, there were few major obstacles for police.

She attributes the city's toughened approach to dealing with party noise as one of the forces that quieted the city this fall.

"It always gets quieter when it gets colder, but we did see a significant decrease from last year to this year during that period," Liebler said.

Steve Eder can be reached at ederstev@msu.edu.