Re: Why does playoff turnout everwhere seem so low?
Attendance figures to me anymore are simply a figment of the imagination of the PR people in charge. For many of these box scores and announced crowds there is no basis in fact. It is not tickets sold. We all know one of the huge reasons for drops in attendance is the high cost of tickets. I don't see how anyone can logically argue that this ISN'T the case. Yet year after year as we see more and more empty seats, everyone says that attendance figures supposedly represent tickets sold. There is no way, as tight as most people's budgets are nowadays, that more than 7000 people shelled out the $$$ to
BUY B1G tickets on Thursday, then 5 or 6000 of them
simply decided not to go. Anyone who saw the crowd for the PSU/UM game KNOWS there weren't 2000 people in the building. And since there were separate tickets required for the second game, you can't say it was the OSU and MSU fans just not showing up yet.
It's only going to get worse IMO. People's spending habits are changing rapidly and substantially when it comes to live sporting events. More and more they have decided this isn't a good value for the price. The Big Ten will do no better in Detroit next near based on the huge dropoff in the interest in the CCHA tournament in Detroit. Van Andel wasn't a total disaster this year due to a decent number of Ferris fans turning out to watch their top seeded team win, but there were still 8 or 9000 empty seats for all the sessions. How many will be in tow next year in the twin cities, especially if the Bulldogs have a down season? Hockey East will now be the standard bearer and did OK based on the absense of any Boston based teams, but there isn't any reason to believe it will improve over time with the way this is trending. It has dropped thousands per session since the early and mid 2000s.
What's worse is I don't see the conferences EVER admitting the conference tournaments are a mistake, no matter how bad this gets. I can envion the day when there are hundreds of people in the stands for some of these games, and yet we will still see box scores that claim there were 5000 there.
It seems to me that instead of having confernence tournaments that have no excitement and don't generate substantial revenue, the leagues should eliminate them and petition the NCAA for a small lengthening of the regular season, perhaps one or two weekends. Another home game or 2 would be much more interesting to most fans than a conference tournament played in a stale and sterile atmosphere, one that nearly every single person who attends a team's home games won't bother to attend.
For leagues that don't expect a second bid as well, the upside is you are sending your best team to the NCAAs. While the gap is closing between the bigger and smaller leagues, it hasn't shut completely. A 6th place DU or an 8th place Notre Dame winning this weekend won't be a total shock, but a middle of the pack Atlantic Hockey team is a much longer shot. If I am Atlantic Hockey I certainly want my best team, one that proved that over more than 2 dozen games, to give the leagues best shot in the NCAAs. Had 1st place Niagara played Notre Dame instead of a last place UAH team that got hot over three days, perhaps CHA would have had a huge upset victory in regular time instead of a double OT loss.
Fans are voting with their wallets and their feet. But the arrogance of those who run college sports means admitting what you are doing isn't working and needs big change will never happen.
