that most of the ark fans at the cws finals are just realizing they have a team? It just feels like most of them are there becsuse its neato and not so much because they actually follow their team.
Does anybody else get the impression
- Thread starter gymdawg.sixpack
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Not in attendance. In their demeanor. In the way they celebrate. Its almost like if i were invited to the stanley cup finals yet acted like i knew what i was watching. Id fake it and celebrate when and like those around me. Thats what i see a lot of the ark fans doing.
I'm sort of the same way with our baseball team --- I couldn't name half the lineup on April 1st. I simply have no interest until basketball is over with. The series with UM was about the time I started really following this year. If we hadn't have just happened to be getting hot about that time, I probably wouldn't have kept up with it over the next ~10 weeks. I feel like a lot of college baseball fans are the same as me or even worse - there's probably a lot that don't follow until regionals start.
How is it worthless? They either sell more tickets AND have more butts in the seats, or they sell more tickets and the butts in seats cannot be ascertained either way. There’s definitely no evidence to suggest we fill up our stadium better than they do.
In 2016, we had less than 8500 in the stadium and a half empty grandstand for the Saturday game against Arkansas....FOR THE SEC CHAMPIONSHIP. It was absolutely pitiful. This year, the first in our brand new ballpark, there were multiple Thursday night SEC games where you saw the normal view of the game from CF camera that shows pitcher, hitter and fans behind the home plate. In the two dozen rows in the visible sections, you could count on your fingers how many people were there, in the best seats in the house. Again, pitiful.
We pack DNF for regionals, super regionals, and Fri / Sat of SBW. That’s it. Beyond those weekends, we have extremely sparse attendance in the entire non-LFL part of the stadium even during SEC weekends. Early returns don’t show that problem being solved by the new ballpark.
Sold tickets are worthless. Who cares if people bought tkts that dont go.
And Im not arguing we put more in the seats. But “we are slipping” indicates that our program isnt supporting the team like we hsed to in attendance. Im asking for evidence of that. Or it indicates more teams are leaping us in attendance. Im asking for evidence of that. Arkansas has outdrawn us for a while They love baseball and have a much larger population to draw from
so in general im looking for something to substantiate how we are slipping
And Im not arguing we put more in the seats. But “we are slipping” indicates that our program isnt supporting the team like we hsed to in attendance. Im asking for evidence of that. Or it indicates more teams are leaping us in attendance. Im asking for evidence of that. Arkansas has outdrawn us for a while They love baseball and have a much larger population to draw from
so in general im looking for something to substantiate how we are slipping
You are right. In many ways I think their enthusiasm for college baseball aligned with the slipping of their basketball program. They've always been a solid to very good baseball program, but they haven't always had the support like we and LSU have. Baum Stadium/expansions helped big too.
It's not totally worthless from a financial standpoint for the school, but nowadays they scan each ticket so they know precisely how many butts are in the seats. In the old days, it was turnstile count. Actual attendance is easy to determine, and that should be the number reported. It can be a sellout without being a full house.
There have been times when my season tickets were not used (I'm talking football ... never had season tickets for baseball). I was counted as an attendee when I was not there. Might as well be counting people who come to the tailgates and never walk in the stadium, whether they have a ticket or not.
There have been times when my season tickets were not used (I'm talking football ... never had season tickets for baseball). I was counted as an attendee when I was not there. Might as well be counting people who come to the tailgates and never walk in the stadium, whether they have a ticket or not.
My point holds tonight. Just look at the ark attendance. Looks and sounds about half of their fans didn't show. This from fans not far away playing for a national title. Im not saying they dont have "good" fans but the folks at the cws seem off....like they only know the pig sooie chant then arent real sure what else to do the rest of the time
We are slipping in our complacency. In the early 90’s, it was MSU / LSU swapping lead dog for SEC and national attendance records year after year. Now, we have been passed by Arkansas, Ole Miss, and South Carolina for the majority of the past 5-10 years, and LSU is leaving everybody in the dust. Of course we are still Top 5 nationally, but we haven’t grown our program / brand. And you can talk about sales vs. asses in seats and which one is more accurate, but everybody counts it the same. It’s not like we have some magic formula that makes our numbers more accurate than everyone else.
And, I can tell you first hand that there aren’t as many folks that make it a priority to attend games as there were in say, 1998. Grandstands in particular are far more empty than they were then. Probably many places you can point to for the blame on all that, but the numbers don’t lie. Hopefully things begin to pick up again with the ballpark being completed and a nucleus from a good team coming back next year. We’ll see.
I think I heard on OOB that there was another large event starting tonight in Omaha and most of the hotels were booked for that event. Piss poor planing if that is the case. Looks like most of the crowd is locals.
I agree with regards to tonight. Even Arkansas fans have jobs and responsibilities, believe it or not. Omaha was crawling with 1000’s on Monday night and they didn’t get to see a game. They were already committed to staying for Tuesday night at a minimum. So with game 2 being played on the night normally game 3 would be, it was Win or go home for the Arkansas Fanbase, even if it wasn’t for the team.
Now to that little home attendance thingy.
Arkansas ave. Attendance #1
Fayetteville metro area is over 200,000. Fort Smith metro area is over 200,000. So that is over 400,000 within 50 miles. Probably more like over a half million.
LSU ave. Attendance #2
Baton Rouge has close to 1 million within 50 miles now since Katrina.
Ole Miss ave. Attendance #3
Lafayette Co., Panola Co., Lee Co., Desoto Co., and Memphis all inside a 70 mike radius has over 500,000.
MSU ave. Attendance #4
Starkville, West Point, Columbus, Tupelo, Winona, and Louisville all inside our 70 mile radius would not be close to 200,000 including all towns in between.
I think the magic number is 1 hour drive for baseball.
When we had the double-headers for SEC games, a two hour trip one way was quite bearable for a family of 4.
Guess how many of our baseball games were on my Apple TV ESPN feed this year? Nearly everyone of them.
Blame the founders for putting the State University of Mississippi in Starkville rather than in or near the State Capital with regards to Athletics attendance figures. But they probably weren’t thinking of Athletics attendance when they founded a LAND GRANT Institution of Higher Learning.
This all just misleading. Every figure you posted above was just as true in 1998 as it is now. And every one of those programs has all their games on TV too. Its all just excuses. All of those programs have grown (including LSU, who was already pretty huge) while we have just been stagnant. Regarding MSU specifically, it was nothing for us to get 9500 on a Wednesday night in the mid 2000’s to see an NCAA bubble team / NIT team coached by Stans. Just this past year, we set the Hump attendance record of well over 10,500....on a Monday night..... for a women’s basketball game. We can’t even get 1,000-2,000 fans LESS than the above numbers for our regular season finale when playing for the SEC title in baseball....on a Saturday. We usually can’t even fill up 1/3rd of the grandstand for any SEC game that doesn’t start on Friday or Saturday.
I honestly don’t know what it is. Maybe our fans have only a certain amount of emotional capital we can pour into MSU sports....and the rising tide of football and women’s BB has adversely affected baseball attendance (this obviously was never a problem 10 years ago). Maybe the season ticket lifers in the grandstands started to age and their kids didn’t care as much. Maybe Polk II and LT really did wipe out an entire generation of MSU baseball fans. I don’t know. But for a school where baseball is supposed to be “our” sport and passion, our fans sure as hell don’t show up quite like they used to. They are still there, but we have most definitely been passed by at least 4 other programs in our own conference in terms of “give a ****” by the fanbase.
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If you're talking about the folks with the good seats behind home plate, they're 20 years older now than they were in 1998. Maybe they find it harder to make the trip now. Should they give up their tickets if that's the case? I don't know.
Correct -- I doubt that baseball or athletic event attendance was a criterion for locating the university, but even if it was, Jackson only had about 5000 people in 1878 so really wasn't much better. Starkville couldn't have possibly been much smaller. Perhaps a much better argument could be made for locating the flagship ** university in the state capital city since it's the university of sophisticats and the erudite.**
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