I mean, I think it’s as simple as the fact that the Michigan basketball fanbase as a whole is fairweather. So unless the team is exciting, attendance will not be good. You can blame whichever side you want as far that goes, although I will say that I feel like probably all college basketball fanbases are fairweather except for the ones that have a tradition of success established, which Michigan does not. Attendance at Value City Arena in Columbus ain’t pretty right now either, and they had an absoutely dominant stretch under Matta that lasted much longer than our 3 years of success.
It really takes a decade plus of building up a truly successful culture before it’s ingrained enough for attendance to be good no matter what.
Post them for free here or on one of the other sites. Donate them back to the ticket dept. Or to Mott. There have been tons of empty seats in the lower bowl, including the best seats at center court. These are often well to do people who don’t care about selling them. Many are football fans with a lot of priority points who scored the best seats; then only show for a few games.
Sane1, you are also welcome to buy some seats and donate them back. It’ll only cost you $6/seat. If every person who complained about empty seats actually bought a seat (and attended) we wouldn’t be having this conversation. This is a demand issue NOT an unused sold ticket issue. Sold tickets wouldn’t go unused if the demand was strong. I’m pretty sure when entire sections are vacant during a game that’s not a season ticket holder issue. I’m in agreement with other folks above, this isn’t just a Michigan issue, this is a college basketball issue. College football has similar issues. All of these conversations (mostly) go away with winning. A fringe tournament team isn’t going to fill seats. Once the team shows the fans they are good enough to make a run in March and the quality of the opponent improves you better believe butts will be in seats.
Got no time right now for a full thing (I might clarify later) but the gist is that corporate season ticket holders that Brandan pandered to are responsible for a lot of the lower bowl issues. The CFO of Alro Steel is a close family friend and I remember him saying at one point that it’s extremely hard to get clients to take those tickets.
While I agree that it’s a college basketball issue overall (as I articulated above), I think the others are right as well that there is a season ticket holder issue, but right now that’s a secondary concern. During my time at Michigan (just graduated), attendance was noticeably bad in the prime lower bowl seats across from the student bleachers compared to the rest of the arena. @tarverine is correct in the fact the corporate season ticket holders who don’t care were an issue.
They pale in comparison to the overall issue this season though.
As a very long time season ticket holder talking like 20 years. Right after the team won the first big ten title when Brandon was the ad, they started the mandatory donation. My family had six seats together which even though we paid the donation got moved apart. Most of the people we sat with had also been long time season ticket holders, and saw it as a slap in the face that when the team improved our loyalty was not rewarded. A lot did not renew at that point. I would say most of the basketball fans have always been fair weather, but its frustrating when they don’t even reward the loyal fans. Also I don’t think the 09:00 games help combined with the questions about this years team.
Sometimes I rewatch games from when we were ridiculously fun to watch and I mean this was the crowd at tipoff as a top 15 team at home in a Big Ten game while we were on our way to the conference title. Except for rivalry games or ranked opponents I’d say that our actual attendance in the lower bowl has been embarrassing for much longer than just the last 3 years. As I said before, I do believe a huge factor in that is that much of the season tickets from the lower bowl are corporate owned. Obviously this year is a new level of badness as they’re not even selling 10,000 tickets and the students are… ugh.
Just playing devils advocate at this point but if we keep this conversation fair and balanced what do we think the upper bowl attendance would look like if we could see it better in this picture? From what you can tell in this picture it looks just as thin as the lower bowl. Love that you have these games at your fingertips to review. That’s hardcore, well done.
To be fair, that photo is from a midweek game against Nebraska.
Attendance this season has been disappointing, but there are limits to what’s realistic. No matter how you handle the lower bowl or unused tickets, are there 12,000 people in the A2 area who want to see the likes of Nebraska or Texas on a weeknight? Are there anywhere near that many?
The person earlier in the thread who said he couldn’t give his tickets away is dead on. Only fanatics will come out for mediocre matchups at inconvenient times, and there just aren’t many of those people out there.
This is a true story. I had season tickets in the lower bowl before Brandon thought he would cash in on the success of the basketball team and re-seat the entire arena which caused several younger season ticket holders to be bumped from the lower bowl to the upper bowl. I have asked every year to be re-seated in the lower bowl, and no luck.
I spoke with 2-3 people at the end of year celebration event in 2014 that had similar stories. Friends from AA from elementary school that had 10 tix+ through the years that got split or bumped up and just said enough was enough.
I also remember the MD game last January. 9pm, lots of snow, but great opponent (and great win) and the place was loud and up for it. Probably driven by opponent who was top 5 I believe.
I’m firmly of the belief that if the on-court product is good that people will show up, and if you cure the issue on the upper deck (meaning people want to come see the team to the point they will sit up there) everything else fills in.
Last random point… at the UCLA game, the bruin fans in our proximity said it was the most packed and loud they had seen that place in years. 90% of that was attributed to the fact that they had just exceeded expectations by beating Kentucky. We need to exceed expectations and people will want to be a part of the buzz.
If we thought the previous attendances were bad I have a feeling Tuesday’s game will take the cake. 9:00 tipoff in the middle of the week 2 days before finals after getting 100 scored on us.
I actually came away from Saturday’s game more optimistic about the rest of this season. Weekday games are just a non-starter for me. Is it finals week? It may be, that won’t help either! At least the game isn’t on BTN+.
I will be back in town this coming weekend and was thinking about checking out the game on Saturday. Since the competition isn’t that great, I don’t really want to pay too much for the game. I was thinking about buying the cheaper upper level tickets and seeing if I can work my way down (I’m assuming it will be pretty empty because of the opponent, students leaving for break, etc.
I haven’t been to Chrisler in a while. Was wondering how strict they are on that. Any thoughts?
