MVC tournament attendance

[Da Coach]

The attendance for today's session was announced as 11,088, and the total for all sessions was 64,451.
Likely there were several thousand fewer people there today than the announced 11,088, since thousands of full session tickets were sold to Wichita State, Creighton, Bradley, and SIU and most of those fans were home watching on TV.
Last year's semifinals and championship games both drew sellout crowds of 22,612 and 85,074 for all sessions.

So it's fair to assume the Drake and ISU were not good for the attendance as were schools with better fan following like Creighton and SIU (last year's finalists). And even the absence of teams with big fan following like Wichita and Bradley, as well as SIU really hurt the attendance for Saturday's semifinals.

[Majik45]

SIU had by far the largest contingent of fans there for any of the Friday games, so having them go out Friday night was a big blow for attendance on Saturday and Sunday. The wrong teams got knocked out early to have good attendance numbers this year for the tourney.

[Stryker]

Wichita's down year really hurt attendance. They usually have around the same number of fans as SIU, obviously not this year.

[lightsout]

Wichita's down year really hurt attendance. They usually have around the same number of fans as SIU, obviously not this year.

Wichita State actually had a good group of fans at the tournament. They definitely out numbered the Indiana St. fans and got rather loud several times during their play in game, especially when Gregg Marshall got ejected from the game. SIU had the best fan following though by far. They had a great student section and plenty of fans in the stands making lots of noise.

[Braves4Life]

I'm hoping to add at least one more to that attendance number next year

[tornado]

No doubt the 4 teams that bring the most fans (BU, SIU, MSU, and WSU) not being in the finals
really hurt the attendance. The upper bowl was largely empty, and the 11K fans at the final game is almost an embarrassment!
That's less than half the attendance at the finals last year and the year before.
As good as Drake and ISU were this year, they need to build bigger and more loyal fan bases.



By the way, the Pantagraph has lots of great pics, these two tell the whole story:

http://www.pantagraph.com/shared-content/gallery/?galleryid=6&gallery_page=0&album_page=0&albumid=281&mediaid=9853

[basketball nut]

No doubt the 4 teams that bring the most fans (BU, SIU, MSU, and WSU) not being in the finals
really hurt the attendance. The upper bowl was largely empty, and the 11K fans at the final game is almost an embarrassment!
That's less than half the attendance at the finals last year and the year before.
As good as Drake and ISU were this year, they need to build bigger and more loyal fan bases.

Especially ISU-I was very dispointed w/ their support-basically no students for as close as they are to STL. Credit to Drake as they got a lot fan support for yesterdays game and were very loud. (maybe it seemed that way sitting in the BU section behind the Drake section)
How do they do the seating anyway as it seemed that the BU group was spread out all over the place. A few down low on the opposite corner from the larger contingent of fans and yet CU gets everything from the middle of the basket to pass half court and they diffently were not split up. Is it based on where you finish the season or what?

[tornado]

I actually have no clue....

Here's what happened to us...........
I already had good tickets, but jumped at an opportunity to get far better seats right behind the BU bench.
We obtained tickets from someone who didn't want to go to the Bradley/Creighton game and who sold us the seats.
Then when we went to sit down, instantly the fans directly in front of us (a middle aged couple) immediately stood and confronted us, telling us we cannot sit there.
I wasn't phased, but the guy didn't relent, and even waived to their AD who was in the area, and hollered
"what's going on, and how did these Bradley fans get in here"...etc
The guy was pretty unreasonable and continued to insist we move and sit elsewhere...even hinting at some vague threat of finding some way to get us moved out.
However, we retained our cool and simply started conversing with the guy and his much more passive and polite wife, and in several minutes, the guy realized we were not only properly ticketed, but that we also we actually pretty good fans, and we continued to converse until the guy became pretty friendly.
I guess he had the entitlement philosophy initially that he should be able to control who sits in his section.
In the end, I had a nice time talking with the fans of other teams, as most were good folks.

[IheartBU]

We shared a cab back to the hotel with some Creighton people after the Creighton game -- they were very diplomatic and kind about the game, and were a great example of classy fans. Ditto to the Drake fans we watched the end of the SIU-UNI game with in our hotel bar ...

A little harder to swallow was the teeming masses of drunk Creighton fans at the Landing on Friday night ...

Also, on the seating, why did it seem like Creighton had complete and total homecourt advantage, fan seating wise? It was 8 or 10 kinds of ridiculous that they were ringing the court with their band and student section right in front of them and the BU fans were behind them with the band and students completely disconnected from the other fans ... just my two cents.

[MDCowboy]

For all of the people who wondered about the seating, here is some of how it works. The MVC assigns seating blocks based on how the standings are looking. That is why Wichita had most of their seats higher in the corners. BU wasn't having a great year either.

In any case, Creighton had their corner behind one of the benches and BU had their corner opposite that same bench on that end.

Now whichever is the higher seeded team gets the bench closer to their fans. That is why CU had the fans by their bench, and BU had the bench in the opposite corner. BU had 3 blocks of fans (those right behind the bench, the students behind the basket, and the big corner of people in the all session block section). So CU did have a big advantage in having their fans clustered. Bad luck to draw CU really, and we could have had the bench closer to our fans if we had beaten CU in Omaha to be the 4 seed.

Note that on Saturday, Drake got to keep their bench near their fans, and CU had to go to the other side. So they were more away from their fans and it split the students from their fan base. Moral of the story - finish better in the regular season and you'll be taken care of. Getting off to a good start in the conference gets you better fan block seats as well.