Attendance at Final Four

[Da Coach]

The men's Final Four was held at Houston's Reliant Stadium, a massive football stadium. And despite an economy that has been blamed for dropoffs in attendance in nearly every sport, and a couple small schools in the Final Four and an absence of all the big-drawing power teams, the semifinals on Saturday still drew 75,421 fans, the largest Final Four attendance in history. The Monday Final drew 70,326, the 3rd largest crowd in history, and the total for the 2 sessions was 145,747, easily the largest total in the history of the Final Four.
It is estimated that the over 80,000 visitors to Houston for the weekend pumped over $100 million into the local economy.

http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=8053588

However, the news was not as good for the Women's Final Four. The Final Four was held at 18,500 seat Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, one of the smallest venues that the Final Four has been held at since 2000. And the Final championship game featured Notre Dame, a team from South Bend, Indiana that brought numerous extra busloads of fans. But the attendance was very disappointing. Despite having an in-state team and having much lower ticket prices than the men, the attendance for Sunday's 2-game session was just 16,421.
Attendance for the championship game Tuesday night was reported as 17,473, for a disappointing 2 session total of 33,894 which is the lowest Final Four average since 1997.

[tornado]

several of the premier teams that have been hyped endlessly by ESPN, Tennessee, Baylor, then UConn & Stanford were bumped and not playing in the Final.....
so I am sure some will say it was because of the lesser known teams in the Final Four...

[TheAsianSensation]

I wouldn't exactly say there was an absence of big name teams when Kentucky was there, so that surely helped the semifinal numbers. But those are very strong numbers for the final.

[Da Coach]

I don't buy that as a reason. The 4 teams could hardly be termed "lesser known" teams.

First, most tickets are purchased well before the Final 4 teams are determined.
And, the top 2 teams in the country, UConn and Stanford (both #1 seeds) were 2 of the Final Four. And Notre Dame and Texas A&M were #2 seeds. Notre Dame and Texas A&M have been Top 10 teams virtually all year, and the ND fans boosted the attendance significantly. I really don't see any way the attendance would have been better with Tennessee there instead of Notre Dame, or Baylor instead of TAMU.