Zipp, if you want to show a chart on BB attendance? Going back to glory days doesn't answer any questions. I remember because I was in the thick of this....
We win the NCAAC in '13. The next season sitting in the upper bowl, I'm thinking what in the heck happened to our fans? We have another banner hanging in the rafters and folks have disappeared?
Of course I will admit and you should too, because I believe you were in the upper bowl also, we were really seeing a thinning out for a couple years prior to '13.
The cost of goods for folks just didn't make common sense in their wallets. That was a TJ problem. Did a few living in glass houses leave because RP had PR issues? Sure but it really was about money for majority.
TJ still had his high rollers, but he missed the thousands of little guys sitting in the rafters. How many of the little guys, like yourself were paying pennies on the dollar and finding empty seats in the lower bowl?
I don't mind talking about Bailout Arena and basketball attendance anytime. You raise a number of points...
The chart goes back to the heyday of U of L basketball in the mid-80s and spans many years prior to Bailout Arena. The cutpoint between arenas is the 2011 data point which was the first at Bailout. Also, the numbers are for REPORTED attendance. When you say you recall sitting in the upper arena post-2013 and asking "where are the fans," that's ACTUAL attendance. Our official attendance declined by 265 (1.2%) between 2013 and 2014.
I would agree that fans not showing up for games--while still paying for tickets--has a been a long and slowly evolving problem. I remember sitting at Freedom Hall in the 2000s and scratching my head about empty seats. Just prior to the move, I remarked that we really only had a couple of true sellouts (closed ticket office) each season. This was the start of the phenomenon seen just about everywhere now. But if you're looking at measured attendance, that effect hadn't hit U of L before the move downtown. Each of the last three seasons at The Hall, we averaged more than 100% of arena capacity.
Now, look at the numbers just for Bailout... Attendance in the first year (2011) was at 98.8% of stated capacity. And it has been below 100% every year and regularly declining. By Pitino's final season, it had declined to 94.4% of capacity. Clearly, there was going to be a problem getting the last couple thousand seats sold in Bailout Arena each year, and I assume Jurich recognized that. What had been some people buying and not showing up changed to those people simply not buying. My take is we can thank the location and/or arena design for that.
The rate of decline in Bailout attendance was 0.8% annually between the years 2011 and 2017 which was Pitino's last. One percent is my rule-of-thumb from what we read about in other programs nationally, and we were experiencing that. The last few years are outsized losses that have nothing to do with national trends, although our "happening everywhere" gang is either oblivious to that fact or tries to dismiss it. And I point that out every time I read it.
In hindsight, the opening of Bailout Arena created an accident waiting to happen. Under the most optimal of circumstances--good economy, high-performing basketball program, competent management, etc.--we could still be averaging 20,000+ attendance. Take a couple of those factors out of the picture, and you have what we see now. And I'm not at all sure that the genie can be put back in the old bottle. I'm almost dead sure that the people we have in charge now can't do it...
