Trends in Attendance

[Doge McDermott]

It'd be more useful if you expressed the differences in percentage points. -247 in an arena that houses 17000 of your closest friends is a drop in the bucket. A +1414 jump from 6599 is pretty significant (ignoring the fact they've play in different arenas.) Weighted averages are your friend.

[HoosierPal]

Don't forget that with Butler's renovations to Hinkle Fieldhouse, seats were taken out. Along with the on-going construction along 52nd street, which eliminates a quarter of the available parking around Hinkle, I'd say the Dawgs are still drawing decently.

Unfortunately all we have left at home for OOC is UT Martin and Belmont, both on less than stellar dates. Students are gone for both. Neither will be a big draw.

[dmac80]

But still, this data set shows a basically flat line to date. Not good, not bad.

A flat line would not be that terrible. I mean look at Xavier or the Pavilion. Those are small, packed gyms. There's no room to fit anyone else.

Despite the reputation of the Big East as one embedded in giant NBA arenas, which constantly holds our schedule back every fall, only two of the ten teams share an arena with an NBA team for the whole season (Marquette and Georgetown). Once DePaul downsizes into their new arena it will further reduce capacity leaguewide.

Capacity will be reduced but I bet attendance at Depaul goes up. First to see the new arena, and second because I think purpose built slightly downsized arena's(8-12k) for most high major basketball programs are a bigger draw than NBA arena's that seat 20k and for most programs sit half empty or worse.

[butlerguy03]

Capacity will be reduced but I bet attendance at Depaul goes up. First to see the new arena, and second because I think purpose built slightly downsized arena's(8-12k) for most high major basketball programs are a bigger draw than NBA arena's that seat 20k and for most programs sit half empty or worse.

Maybe I have a bias here, but the atmosphere in any pro arena just doesn't compare to the intimate smaller atmosphere in college-specific arenas. I watched Georgetown vs Kansas and it just looked boring to be there.

[dmac80]

For Providence I was disappointed to see slightly less than 10k for the opener where we raised the BE Championship banner. I was there, it felt like we had at least 10-11k (12,400 capacity) but the numbers say otherwise. Other than that we had a great showing for URI -full house and some other decent OOC showings (8k vs Yale). We always get some really weak showings in the early OOC schedule and the 9pm starts from FS1 compound the issue. Other than that the school reports that Season ticket sales are up this year and are now over 5,000 with goal of 7500 in the future. (Had dwindled down to 3k before Ed Cooley arrived). Student tickets also reported up, Providence still sells these cheap and with special gimmicks if they attend, I'd like to see them give them away like some other schools in the conference do. Last year we averaged over 10k a game for BE games if you take away a 9pm game against Butler in a terrible blizzard that limited turnout significantly.

Nova gets killed by that 6500 seat on campus gym, I wish they could find a way to renovate it or rebuild and make that capacity a bit bigger, but I understand from fans on here that the location/surrounding community is not supportive of such a move.