Pathetic showing by Oklahoma fans.
- Thread starter Skutt
- Start date
Miami and OKL are not the schools you judge bball attendance by...
.
.
When they are number one, I sure will.
People can say what they want about the SEC "only" caring about football, but when schools like Tennessee get a number one ranking, they fill the arena.
Yep. Sadly, the sport ain't what it used to be. National interest in Kentucky's favorite sport has been steadily dropping for years now.
Still, seeing the No. 1 ranked team have that many empty seats is rather jarring.
This is somewhat true, the stacked junior and senior teams made for a better product.
I think the bigger problem is that the tournament has simply gotten so big it has made the casual fan forget about the regular season.
Ratings for the NCAAT are higher than ever. Fans are rabid for it. That said, when a team (like, say, UK in 2013-14) can lose 9-10 games in the regular season, fall out of the top 25, win no conference season/tourney title, and be assigned an 8 seed...then roll all the way to the final game, the casual fan starts to wonder why they should spend large amounts of money to view a meaningless regular season contest.
Especially when that contest is against someone like the Red Raiders who is obviously an unranked, irrelevant squad.
Obviously there are a few fan bases passionate enough that they will be there, but those are the rarities with the game in its current state.
As a side note, the NCAA could fix this. Shrink the tournament back to 16 or 32 teams, make the regular season actually matter again, and you see a spike in attendance almost immediately.
Oklahoma or any of it's cities I can't speak on, but purely regarding fan support, Miami is one of the worst sports towns in the country.
Sad for the players, all the work you put in to earn that ranking and half your fan base doesn't give a rats d**k
Even if it is basketball at a football school... being ranked in the top 2 should get butts in the seats.
Many years ago Lon Kruger coached Gators to their first F4. A couple years later he left them and part of his disgust was lack of fan support filling the bleachers especially when he had a pretty good team rolling. He actually mentioned such in his farewell speech. Gators didn't give a rats ass. Still don't. Now Lon is back in same same situation. Welcome to another football school ho hum.
Attendance is up everytime Kentucky plays. It doesn't matter where we play. They even get free tee shirts and pizza for coming.
If Cal left today and a few other coaches turned us down. I wouldnt mind having Lon Kruger as our coach for 4-5 years before he retires.
With the product even the top teams are giving us, can you blame people for not wanting to spend a lot of money, when you can watch it in HD on a huge screen in the comfort of your man cave?
Na...
Give me a game atmosphere any day of the week over sitting at home.
Besides, ever since we banned all forms of smoking in my man cave I couldn't care less
