I know a lady that has season tickets to UM bball and they don’t make a lot of games cause around Christmas they go to their summer home in Arizona. Her and her husband posts the tickets for sale in Facebook Michigan groups and if they sell they sell. If not she donates them to a local Ronald McDonalds house. Of course for them it helps cause they are local…being a out of state ticket holder this would be much harder to deal with.
I just don’t get it though. I just can’t believe its that BARE in the Crisler. We can get over 110K to show up for football…which I mean is understandable haha. How come more people won’t show up to games? I understand students if its finals week and all, but what about the rest of the general pop crowd. Why people in the area don’t go to games?
Its the product being placed on the court and the competition of opponents coming to Crisler. I am a BIG fan of Beilein, but these last few years haven’t been expected after a National Championship run and a few other great seasons produced. Unfortunately we have finished 2nd or 3rd in a players recruiting race way too many times these last few years.
I don’t expect Michigan to be a Duke, Kentucky or even North Carolina, but I do expect more from the bball program. But I mean we should be at least fighting for top 15 classes almost on a year to year basis at least or close to it.
Anyway, this is a Attendance topic. Maybe they should lower the price of Tix to get more people in the seats!!!
Could the style of play factor in at all? Just curious on thoughts.
I mean, the NBA is awful basketball but it’s entertaining with the athletes.
Or maybe it’s that we only have 1 guy from Michigan on the active roster?
Maybe they don’t identify with the team as much?
I know here in Indiana, “local” guys help draw buzz a lot.
I think I can safely say ticket prices are NOT the problem. One look on Stubhub and tickets for Saturday’s game can be had for $6 in the upper bowl and $10 in the lower bowl. I’ve come to the conclusion this is just how it is. When the team has success the more casual fan will come as we saw a few years ago. After two years of a relative let down following years where we enjoyed the deep tourney runs the casual fans lost interest. College basketball is so damn hard to be consistent year after year because of the flight risk of successful kids to the NBA. We are never going to be a consistent landing spot for one and done players because (IMO) most of those kids aren’t going to want to put up with the academic rigor at Michigan. Because of that, it makes it that much harder to reload when we lose a guy to the league and maintain that high level of play. I think Beilein has the team headed in the right direction particularly with the younger guys on the current team.
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True and I agree. Just hard to believe no one goes to games. I think it is to the degree of not having a better overall team of course. I haven’t checked out those prices on stubhub but that makes it even more crazy since they are that cheap and no one goes at all still. You would think more people in the local area would go. Its a byproduct of The guys we did lose to NBA and the players that are on the team. I guess I just expected more recruits to land with UM after those great runs. I mean I myself don’t expect 1 and done players for UM and don’t expect to be the Dukes and Kentuckys of the world, but I don’t look at Michigan as being just a football school. Michigan BBALL has a very good history.
Wonder how long the leash will be for Beilein with Warde at the helm.
But whatever lol…I just expect better overall recruits then what we have seen. Beilein does have the team headed in a right direction yes, but that seems to be said the last 3 years. Too many misses on guys lately and bumming me out haha.
The attendance against UMES was easily the best of the year with the upper deck behind the baskets moderately filled. Shockingly (not really) it came in a game where students weren’t given those seats. The lower bowl was a bit better than usual but still quite empty, which brings me to something I just noticed. I saw that the lower bowl was like this for a game from 2010:
This is a game against Harvard early on in a season with very few expectations after going 15-17 the previous year and not getting any majorly hyped recruits, in a season where we were 4-2 at the time with a loss to UTEP. I do think this shows that perhaps a concerted effort to get those tickets out of the hand of companies and back into the core fan base would do a large part in increasing lower bowl attendance even without an increase in the team’s performance. Now a caveat applies that the overall attendance for the game was only around 10,000 but I’d much rather have those people packed in the lower bowl so it at least isn’t as embarrassing for recruits and others who watch it on TV.
Also @umhoops I’m not sure how well this forum system handles many large pictures (I know it freaks out some of them) so if posting these is bad just let me know.
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I would very much down with using season ticket holder attendance as a means to prioritize seat arrangements for the next year.
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This may go to what I’ve been saying about how if filling seats were the priority, seats could be filled, including with super-loyal UM clerical and maintenance personnel. And subsidizing some of those seats now might pay off later in steady season-ticket holders and energized, winning squads.
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I’m part of the problem here - and I think there are too many others just like me, which means IMO this isn’t going away. UM Bball is THE team for me, and I consider myself a die hard sports fan in general (all sports).
But other than the 1 to 2 games I go to each year, I’d just rather watch on the couch on the big screen. I wasn’t always this way…I had season tix from 2000 -2008 and I wouldn’t miss a single game (I used to bring friends and we’d get there an hour early to watch Petway put on a dunk clinic).
I still think our attendance will show out for the big games in February, which are the games I definitely want our recruits watching, but I think the new trends in sport-viewership will cause the Crisler attendance to be pretty abysmal.
In Metro-Detroit, Michigan basketball just doesn’t have a following the way the other major sports teams do. So unless we have this amazing 3-4 year run that essentially forces this team into everyday sports conversation, I don’t see the casual fan doing anything more than being pleasantly surprised that a UM bball game is on TV when they’re flipping through the stations.
That was a long winded answer to say that I just don’t think even the “Walmart Wolverine” fanbase cares about this program enough to invest time going to games…let alone the neutral but above average sport fans.
Off topic a bit, but I was at the CBS Sports Classic in Las Vegas over the weekend and saw great fan base support from North Carolina, UCLA and Kentucky, but very few from Ohio State. Does their fan base historically not travel well?
Certainly not in comparison to UNC or UK. UCLA is much closer.
Not sure any OSU fans are traveling to Las Vegas when they are saving up their money for the CFP.
Yeah, basically what Dylan said plus a general apathy in the OSU basketball fan base right now.