I am in Florida so I will be watching all of these remaining conference games on ESPN+ like I have been all season but now that school is back in session and they have a legitimate chance at OVC Championship I hope we get some decent crowds. I know its not going to be like the late 80s when we were getting 6500 every night but it would be nice to see at least 3000 or so at these games coming down the stretch.

Agreed. Maybe Coach Tuke can get the FB team there like he has in the past and some frats and sororities show up. It will never be like when I was a kid and the first few years of averaging 5k in the SMC. But I’ll be happy if Thursday night I can’t hear the couple of courtside knuckleheads from my seats because there’s 2500 or 3K other fans in the stands with me.

Student attendance will never be consistently good until they move the band. The band is way too big and takes up 2/3 of the good student seats. So what happens is students come to the game, have to sit all the way in the corner, and then never want to come back because their seats were terrible. Until someone tells the band to go back to the the side of the steps that they used to be in, instead of the whole freaking middle and closest to the other team's bench, students will never consistently return to games.

(01-17-2023 12:55 PM)redmyers Wrote:  Student attendance will never be consistently good until they move the band. The band is way too big and takes up 2/3 of the good student seats. So what happens is students come to the game, have to sit all the way in the corner, and then never want to come back because their seats were terrible. Until someone tells the band to go back to the the side of the steps that they used to be in, instead of the whole freaking middle and closest to the other team's bench, students will never consistently return to games.

I truly don't think the band placement is why more students don't go. When I was a student I guess 7+ years ago at this point I never once heard someone make a comment about how bad the free seats are. There hasn't been a coach that has really made the effort to get students involved. That as well as there being no tradition or sustained success of the team it is really hard to market to students to come out on a Thursday evening to watch basketball

If Rick Ray could average over 2500 attendance for OVC games during one of his seasons, surely that can be matched. I'll be honest I'm not a fan of Saturday afternoon games....much rather have a 7 or 7:30 start like the old days. Is that an OVC mandated thing?

(01-18-2023 12:14 AM)RankinEllis Wrote:  If Rick Ray could average over 2500 attendance for OVC games during one of his seasons, surely that can be matched. I'll be honest I'm not a fan of Saturday afternoon games....much rather have a 7 or 7:30 start like the old days. Is that an OVC mandated thing?

I have wondered the same thing. We actually started playing Saturday afternoon games several years ago in the Sun Belt. Historically, we also always drew much better on Saturday night. I was told that Sun Belt teams wanted to be able to get out of town and back home by Saturday night. Not sure if it was an actual rule, but more of a courtesy to other teams. No idea if the OVC has any rules or policies on this. To be honest, now that I am retirement age, I probably prefer driving to the arena in the daylight hours. Still, if it improved attendance (I think it probably would) I would be for moving games to 7pm or so.