Definitely a better schedule than Michigan’s, but would fans be totally excited for this non-conference home schedule:
Morgan State, Lehigh, William & Mary, Villanova, Cal, Oakland. Obviously you have two HMs at home instead of one, but they also played a preseason tourney against all MM Teams.
Compared to our schedule, personally I would say yes.
I got this email as well (since I’m graduating and moving to Madison). I’m guessing that means we’ll probably have about 1600-1850 student tickets sold next year.
And this is why Warde can’t ignore the past two seasons.
Wondering if this is a problem at some of the other “football schools”? Don’t have the time to investigate, as I waste/spend my only available free time on this forum instead, and rely on you gents for the granular details.
I’m sure part of the problem with the student tickets is where they’re located.
Those numbers usually come out in the summer for the past year. Michigan was 24th in attendance for 14-15 I would be surprised if they were top 25 this year because they didn’t sellout a single game this year.
Thanks - I remember even in '13 when we were ranked #1, playing at home against Northwestern, the student section attendance still wasn’t impressive. I guess my point is that our general fanbase - students included - still have a tendency to only bring it for the big games when the ranking of the opponent entices them.
So you’re saying we have to be a consistent Final Four contender to draw fans? Good luck with that. The point is, why can Nebraska (and in their place, pick any other mediocre program) draw a ton of fans, and we can only do that when the team is awesome?
MSU draws like crazy whether they have Final Four talent or not. I mean, the 2014/15 team never once looked like a Final Four squad during the regular season, yet their fans show up in droves.
What were the attendance numbers this year?
So many factors in my opinion, more than I could list here…if you look at the 14/15 attendance list, a lot of the schools that had higher avg attendance are schools that either 1) Have consistently been successful for decades - a basketball school, 2) Don’t have to compete with other major sports markets (i.e. pro sports teams), and/or 3) Have a student body/student section that is comprised of kids from the area who have been rooting for that team since they were in diapers.
I realize that’s a fairly broad generalization, but when I was at UM from 2000-2003, none of my roomates were from the state and none of them had student tickets.
Meanwhile, all of my Sparty friends from high school would easily admit that being part of the Izzone (sp?) was at least a small factor in why they were looking forward to attending the school.
I guess this is a long-winded answer of saying yes, the easiest way we truly up our attendance numbers is to consistently win (maybe not Final 4s, but any years missing the tourney will certainly decrease the desire for student tix). Not sure what Warde could possibly do about any of this though…
average attendance this year was 11,695 per game. The year prior the average was 12,698 so that’s pretty much a decrease of 1000 fans per game. I am sure some will gloss over that but it’s not something that should be taken lightly especially with the news today.
Yeah, I was thinking the out-of-state student population is probably a significant factor in this. Yet they love football (although, during the final year of Hoke, attendance was really down, so maybe the football support wasn’t going to be there forever either).
I think getting some better non-conference games on the schedule would help.
I’m sure the athletic department would like to see as many people as possible attend, of course. With that said, seeing 10,000 empty seats at a football game is probably much more alarming to them than an extra 1,000 empty seats at Crisler.
Honestly, I wouldn’t say the vast majority of the student population here “loves football”. Football tailgating Saturday is the main event. It’s why the student section starts to thin out after halftime in most non-marquee games.
I would say that poor student attendance probably has most to do with out of state students not caring. 41% of the student body is out of state. So, nearly half of the student body grew up without a connection to Michigan. Then you take into account the fact that Michigan has had only 3 good seasons in about 16 or so years, you can see that the program isn’t super friendly for bandwagon/casual fans. Even the kids that grew up in Michigan, grew up not caring about Michigan basketball. By comparison, MSU has a culture built up over 16-18 years of excellence.
And then, Michigan fans tend to be tame in general.
Thanks - that’s quite a bit when you figure 17 home games.
Though it holds 12,707 so if we averaged 12,698 last year that’s pretty impressive.
Keep in mind that that attendance number includes 2530 students for every game.
Whereas the actual student attendance is much lower.
http://www.mgoblue.com/tickets/students-bkm-season-plan.html
I hear you. I grew up in Grand Rapids and was a huge Michigan football and basketball fan, but at a time when the team was good at basketball (the 1980s). I guess for kids growing up in the past 15 years, as you say, there wasn’t much to be excited about, while MSU was really good.
Maybe the opposite happened from say 1993-2007 with UM/MSU football.
Missing the tourney for the nine straight years before JB arrived really hurt, plainly. It just seems like we would have more support now that we seemed to have turned a corner three years ago.
We have to be conference contenders to draw fans in.
No one wants to come watch soft as toilet paper basketball with zero high level athletes on the floor. Whether it’s JB coaching or Steve Kerr.
Put out a quality product and fans will come out and watch. The last two years have not been quality no matter how much spin you throw on it.
We should absolutely be a conference contender in 2016/2017.
Again, you manage to interject your own biases into the discussion with the “soft as toilet paper” comment - we’ve always played a finesse style of basketball, even when we went to the title game and won the Big Ten the following year. Plenty of fans showed up then. And even this year, we beat two top 15 teams (Maryland, Purdue) at home and made the tourney, so it’s not like we were terrible.
The point about high level athletes is fair, though Dawkins was certainly a high level athlete (albeit not a particularly capable basketball player) and so was Caris, though he was injured. I’d also say Walton is above average for his position.
And again, we all recognize the team wasn’t as good as it has been. But it’s not like we won 10 games, either. So again, if the fans are only going to show up when the team is ranked in the top 10, that’s pretty lame.
And really, I think it just speaks to whether students and other grads are basketball fans in general. Even if Michigan isn’t great in a given year, if it were me, I’d still like to see some of the other good teams in the conference play.