Re: What if the Committee Decides to Makes Changes to the Tournament Design?
I think 3500 or even 4000 is a better threshold. My reasoning: the average first day attendance for the last five years (20 regionals) is 5889, which of course is two first round games. If we just divide in half, we get 3000, your number. But in pretty much every one of those regionals the crowd attractiveness of the two games wasn’t equal; if I estimate the crowd was divided 60-40, and multiply by .6, I get 3533 as a reasonable expected crowd size. And if the fact that the home rink, rather than a regional site that may be quite distant, increases the attendance even more, you could have crowds of 4000.
I think there are some nuances that are being overlooked.
- Currently, first day at the regional is sold as a session pass (1 ticket = 2 games). Those attendance numbers are attendance to the session. Meaning you are drawing from 4 fan bases to get that 5889. Actual butts in seats for each individual game is considerably less than total attendance. This is why most regionals report a lower attendance for the 2nd day despite the arena looking more full than it did for either of the first-round games. In actuality, using the attendance figure you have found, the number of fans PER TEAM in the first round is under 1500.
EDIT: Going back and rereading your post I see I misunderstood and you
were acknowledging that those attendance numbers were for 2 games. It doesn't change my final point here. Admittedly, an on-campus first round would make it more difficult for the visitor's fans, but final attendance numbers would not be affected as home fans would surely pick up the slack.
- Second, you have to operate under the assumption that in the
majority of cases, teams that have a large fan base that travels for the current regionals also have larger home rinks, and vice versa. This is of course not
always the case, but generally speaking it is.
I haven't gone back to look at exact attendance numbers for each day of the past regionals. I would have assumed 5,000 a day on average. But coming closer to what you have found for 1st day attendance, let's say 5,500 a day on average for both days of the regional.
5500 a day x 2 days at each site x 4 sites = 44,000.
Using the data I posted yesterday, the
smallest crowds an on-campus first round could have accommodated in the last 10 years is 42,804. That was in 2011, a year when half of the top 8 played in a rink that seated less than 3500 (MIA-3200 MER-2549 YA-3486 UNi-2225).
And of course moving to different site in the event the rink is too small just exacerbates the competitive advantage that the big programs already have; they get a home rink game regardless, but the smaller programs don’t.
I don't think there would be any need to set a minimum capacity threshold. The only schools that would pose serious attendance issues are all in Atlantic Hockey; and as I said yesterday, until the formula for ranking the teams changes or Atlantic Hockey makes an incredibly large imporevement on a conference-wide scale, that just isn't going to be an issue.
