Inaugural Big East Conference Tournament / MSG

[RxJay]

Does anyone have the attendance figures for all the other conference tournaments? I think that could be very interesting.

[FormulaX]

The Big Ten "sold out" Bankers Life fieldhouse 18,000 seats. But that is comparing apples to watermelons.

[marquette]

The Big Ten "sold out" Bankers Life fieldhouse 18,000 seats. But that is comparing apples to watermelons.

12 teams (soon to be 14), and only one of them below 25,000 enrollment (side note, Nebraska is by a decent margin the smallest state school with 25,000. Didn't realize that). Even Northwestern has approximately 15,000. Plus Indiana is right in the heart of B1G territory, where a lot of alumni live. Several schools are within reasonable driving distance. It would be pretty embarrassing to not be able to get 18,000 fans with those numbers. Heck, Ohio State+Michigan State+Minnesota=more students than all our schools combined.

[Wizard of Westroads]

If this were called the "Pieced Together After Football Blew Up the Old Big East Conference" Tournament, it would be a resounding success. Good crowds for the first year, especially considering closer schools such as GT, SH and SJ did not have stellar seasons.

This league always shrinks in comparisons to the old Big East, and will continue to until we get everything sorted out. This league has a great future, but two of our marquee programs had lousy years by their standards. If Nova has a super year next year, which is possible, and carries the banner deep into the NCAA, then people will notice. If GT or Marquette get it together as well, then that will open eyes as well.

Credit the presidents with grabbing the Big East name and the tourney at the Garden, but this is not the same league. Creighton, X and Butler fans have seen what lower-level leagues look like, and we know this isn't one. My hope is that at some point in the future, we'll have a basketball-first crazy-good league that old BE members will embrace.

[robinreed]

14,000 in the inaugral championship is not good, period. If there is ever a banner year it's your first year, kind of like opening day in baseball, typically teams largest crowds of the year. At 14,000 that's only 1400 tickets per school.

regular season - St. John's had 11,700 and 12,500 for home MSG games with Nova & Marquette and Seton Hall had 6600 vs OU at Barclays and 6200 ooc versus the big gate draw of Eastern Washington and 8300 vs DePaul.

So if St. John's and Seton Hall didn't account for 5,000 people then that's terrible, so now you're down to 9,000 tickets for the other 8 schools. I doubt if DePaul brought anyone but Xavier, Creighton and Butler should've been there with bells on.

14,000 is weak by any rational analysis.

14,000 is not bad at all for a first tournament. Remember that except for ND the schools that are no longer members of the BE had student enrollment between 25,000 and 52,000 and living alumni 10 to 20 times that number. We will not achieve success or failure based on attendance but rather based on TV viewership. As regards TV viewership we still have a long way to go, as regards attendance we are very close to being there already.

[Randy]

14,000 in the inaugral championship is not good, period. If there is ever a banner year it's your first year, kind of like opening day in baseball, typically teams largest crowds of the year. At 14,000 that's only 1400 tickets per school.

regular season - St. John's had 11,700 and 12,500 for home MSG games with Nova & Marquette and Seton Hall had 6600 vs OU at Barclays and 6200 ooc versus the big gate draw of Eastern Washington and 8300 vs DePaul.

So if St. John's and Seton Hall didn't account for 5,000 people then that's terrible, so now you're down to 9,000 tickets for the other 8 schools. I doubt if DePaul brought anyone but Xavier, Creighton and Butler should've been there with bells on.

14,000 is weak by any rational analysis.

14,000 is not bad at all for a first tournament. Remember that except for ND the schools that are no longer members of the BE had student enrollment between 25,000 and 52,000 and living alumni 10 to 20 times that number. We will not achieve success or failure based on attendance but rather based on TV viewership. As regards TV viewership we still have a long way to go, as regards attendance we are very close to being there already.

I was curious and had to look up Notre Dame's enrollment after reading this. 8,000 undergrad??? I knew they were relatively small, but dear god. The following they have is, quite frankly, astonishing with that number of alums.

[robinreed]

14,000 in the inaugral championship is not good, period. If there is ever a banner year it's your first year, kind of like opening day in baseball, typically teams largest crowds of the year. At 14,000 that's only 1400 tickets per school.

regular season - St. John's had 11,700 and 12,500 for home MSG games with Nova & Marquette and Seton Hall had 6600 vs OU at Barclays and 6200 ooc versus the big gate draw of Eastern Washington and 8300 vs DePaul.

So if St. John's and Seton Hall didn't account for 5,000 people then that's terrible, so now you're down to 9,000 tickets for the other 8 schools. I doubt if DePaul brought anyone but Xavier, Creighton and Butler should've been there with bells on.

14,000 is weak by any rational analysis.

14,000 is not bad at all for a first tournament. Remember that except for ND the schools that are no longer members of the BE had student enrollment between 25,000 and 52,000 and living alumni 10 to 20 times that number. We will not achieve success or failure based on attendance but rather based on TV viewership. As regards TV viewership we still have a long way to go, as regards attendance we are very close to being there already.

I was curious and had to look up Notre Dame's enrollment after reading this. 8,000 undergrad??? I knew they were relatively small, but dear god. The following they have is, quite frankly, astonishing with that number of alums.

Your comment is true Randy but please remember that ND's following (i.e the subway alumnus) is based exclusively on football success over the last 80 plus years. They have never had that kind of support in BB hence we should not compare ND to the new BE.

[Bluejay]

Let's be honest a second.

If we want to have better conference tourney attendance figures, the fans from schools closest to NYC need to show up better. I was at the tourney and those schools were very sparsely represented. Providence showed up for the title game, but had been relatively absent prior to that one. I expected to see a lot more SJU and Nova fans (although I suppose maybe they left after the early upsets).

Relying on the midwestern schools to bring huge crowds yearly is a recipe for failure; Creighton fans travel well, but we aren't going to be able to bring 4000 people every year as the trip is just too expensive for us. If the northeastern schools, who can attend for merely the price of a ticket, won't show up, this thing will flame out and we'll have to start considering Chicago as an alternate venue.

[NJRedman]

Let's be honest a second.

If we want to have better conference tourney attendance figures, the fans from schools closest to NYC need to show up better. I was at the tourney and those schools were very sparsely represented. Providence showed up for the title game, but had been relatively absent prior to that one. I expected to see a lot more SJU and Nova fans (although I suppose maybe they left after the early upsets).

Relying on the midwestern schools to bring huge crowds yearly is a recipe for failure; Creighton fans travel well, but we aren't going to be able to bring 4000 people every year as the trip is just too expensive for us. If the northeastern schools, who can attend for merely the price of a ticket, won't show up, this thing will flame out and we'll have to start considering Chicago as an alternate venue.

Too bad we have a contract with MSG through 2026 and then you'd have to convince the 5 eastern schools that giving up MSG to the ACC is a good idea. If you haven't noticed MSG isn't interested in a rotation. The only way we leave MSG and NYC for Chicago is if MSG refuses to resign us and we are FORCED out. The conference will NEVER voluntarily leave MSG.

[lolhoya]

Let's be honest a second.

If we want to have better conference tourney attendance figures, the fans from schools closest to NYC need to show up better. I was at the tourney and those schools were very sparsely represented. Providence showed up for the title game, but had been relatively absent prior to that one. I expected to see a lot more SJU and Nova fans (although I suppose maybe they left after the early upsets).

Relying on the midwestern schools to bring huge crowds yearly is a recipe for failure; Creighton fans travel well, but we aren't going to be able to bring 4000 people every year as the trip is just too expensive for us. If the northeastern schools, who can attend for merely the price of a ticket, won't show up, this thing will flame out and we'll have to start considering Chicago as an alternate venue.

And how do you suggest the conference get more of those fans to attend?

Simply blaming fans isn't productive. I know you aren't necessarily doing that here, but I see it all the time from others. "You should show up" doesn't actually work. Whether or not people should show up is irrelevant. The conference needs to do stuff that actually gets people to show up.

IMO, the ways you can guarantee more attendance are through:
a) Increased and smarter marketing
b) Lower prices
c) More teams
d) Better teams (though that's on the individual teams and not on the conference)

I think the league could do a better job with some of these things next year. There wasn't much in the way of marketing this year. Hopefully that's just a first year thing and the league will have more time/resources to market the tournament better in the future. I'm not sure if the league has any say on price so that may or may not be a possibility. And finally of course, expanding the league to more teams would help with attendance.