(11-07-2013 10:18 AM)ohio1317 Wrote: Not true that only care about football. I'll definitely grant basketball plays a definite second fiddle at several schools (including mine) and does not get a lot of attention till conference play starts, but the attendance numbers are still very high overall (highest in the country actually). Beyond that, you have some basketball first schools like Indiana and increasingly Purdue.
Yeah, I've never understood that line of thinking mainly because anyone that takes two seconds to look at the numbers will figure out just how wrong they are (just like every time that someone says that "No one likes boring Big Ten football," the objective ratings numbers clearly prove them wrong).
To use an analogy, the Celtics might the #4 pro team in the Boston market when it comes to fan support and intensity. However, the support that Boston has for the Celtics is still far greater than most of the #1 pro teams in their respective markets. That's the Big Ten - even the self-described football schools have larger basketball fan bases than the vast majority of self-described basketball schools elsewhere.
The Big Ten has had the highest average *basketball* attendance in the country for nearly 4 decades straight. How many schools can sell out over 16,500 seats every single night for basketball like Wisconsin and Ohio State, which their own fans would describe as "football schools"? The Big Ten has 8 of the top 25 schools for basketball attendance (including newcomer Maryland), while the vaunted basketball fan bases of the ACC only have 4 (concentrated at the top with the unusually large arenas of Louisville, Syracuse and UNC along with NC State). The SEC and Big 12 each have 3 in the top 25, while the Pac-12 only has 1 (Arizona). So, basketball fandom in the Big Ten isn't just a few elite outliers driving up the numbers - when over half of your conference is in the top 25 of basketball attendance, that shows top-to-bottom support for the sport even in a supposedly football-oriented conference.
About 99% of the athletic departments would kill for that type of across-the-board support for multiple sports. People can actually enjoy and excel at both sports - one shouldn't take away from the other (as schools like Ohio State and Florida have shown).
On a side note, that's a large part of the reason why the Big Ten Network has been able to sell well in its home markets - we (as Big Ten fans) actually do watch a lot of *both* football and basketball (and that's an underrated strength of the conference when it's being compared to the new SEC and Pac-12 Networks along with the prospect of an ACC network). When the BTN was going through carriage negotiations when it was started, it was actually basketball that pushed cable carriers over the edge. If you're a Big Ten fan, you can probably figure out ways to get to a bar a few times per year to watch your football team on BTN. There's a realistic workaround for football. However, it's virtually impossible to follow your basketball team unless you have BTN at home (or are willing to spend way more at the bar than you ever would for just paying for cable). In practicality, the BTN is simply a different vehicle than the old ESPN Plus syndicated package that the conference had when it comes to football. I don't get access to too many other football games than I had before. However, the BTN is unbelievable for basketball - that's where it's totally different since it has nightly access to an entire slate of games that people never had under the old syndication model.