'What's wrong with college basketball?'

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/mensbasketball/story/2012-03-08/college-basketball-concerns-attendance-drop/53424996/1?loc=interstitialskip


The attendance dip has been particularly notable during the regular season, with average Division I crowds dropping each of the past four years. The NCAA won't release numbers for 2011-12 until after the tournament, but USA TODAY's calculations show another slight dip across the six biggest-name conferences — the Atlantic Coast, the Big East, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pacific-12 and the Southeastern. Their collective average is down almost 6% in four years.

... Most troubling are the numbers in what traditionally has been a bastion of college hoops, the ACC, where regular-season attendance fell beneath 10,000 a game for the first time in recent history a year ago and slid a little further this season — to 9,632. That's down nearly 1,400 from just four years ago.

I'm assuming that Bubbler is preparing his letter-to-the-editor to USA Today as we speak.

 

1. People do not have money to go to games.
2. There are no "stars" in college basketball anymore. Once they start to become a "star," they are off to the NBA.

 

The story raises an issue I was getting at a year ago - the sport is a victim of the Tournament's success. It's a cautionary tale for college football, that's for sure.

 

3. The regular season doesn't mean a thing. The system rewards big-conference mediocrity with tournament bids, and the tournament is the only thing that matters to a fan.

 

When you only play 11 games or so and only four or eight teams have a shot at the big prize, every game does count.

 

Part of it is expense. Microville Tech has some specials for non-conference games and special ticket package for home games over Christmas break, but the cheapest ticket for a conference game is $15, and it's $25 for a reserved seat. Even in nosebleed/endzone GA, if you have 2-3 kids you're looking at dropping $75-$100 for a college basketball game when you throw in a drink, parking etc.

That's a nice chunk of change for a lot of families (mine included). Luckily we've gotten some free tickets from a friend who gets them as a tradeout, but otherwise I'm not paying $100 or so for two hours.

 

The tournament is such a money cow that they would never do it, but it might help the sport to scale back the tournament. But I don't think the regular season attendance and TV revenue gained would balance out the money lost by a smaller tourney.

 

I don't think the talent level has anything to do with it. Fans follow their schools regardless of who the players are.

Pure and simple attendance is down because of the economy. People can't afford to go to games.

 

If TV ratings are down as well, then the economy is not the only problem.

 

The tickets are too damn high.

 

I think that's part of it, but it doesn't necessarily explain away the student drop. Their tickets are cheap. They just don't have the patience to go to a gym for two or three hours these days. Not when they can get real-time updates on their Monolith Mega Phone 3000.

Honestly, I think that college basketball is a victim of the same thing as the baseball postseason: The NFL.

 

The piece hedges on that. I'm not sure what this means:

"Regular-season ratings have steadied over recent years, and even nudged upward this year on ESPN."