Warning: researching and writing this thread depressed me, so feel free to skip. I got curious about attendance when I was looking into the GTAA debt and finances, and have fallen into a rabbit hole. Hopefully I'll get this out of my system by posting this thread. GT MBB attendance is eroding away, which I think is partly nationwide trends and partly GT specific. I fully understand the multiple reasons that GT fans could have for no longer attending games. From my perspective, the problem is that there is a network effect. In the age of HDTV (and Atlanta traffic, etc.) the advantage of making the effort to attend live sports is to experience the game with a crowd of people. The fewer people attending, the less attractive it is to attend.
Part of what prompted my further research was just looking around the arena at the Clayton State game. Admittedly Game 1, and some confusion about whether it was an exhibition or a counting game, but still it was very sparse. And looking at the box score afterwards, the attendance was just over 3k, which seemed small. Here are pictures from the first four games this year, taken at the first timeout.
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Since McCamish opened, there have been 178 "counting" MBB games played there. 13 of those games were in 2020-2021 when attendance was capped at (and reported as)1,200 per game. Of the remaining165 games, here are the 10 lowest reported attendance figures.
2017 Tusculum was a last-minute game against a DII school added when GT was supposed to have a bye, because Pastner wanted to keep the team in the rhythm of 2 games per week. 2016 Houston was an NIT game in Gregory's last year. 2014 Boston College was a game delayed two days because of a winter storm.
Stepping back, here is the reported average home game attendance per season since the beginning of the Cremins era.
2012 was the year McCamish was under construction, so GT home games were played in Gwinnett and at Philips Arena. My capacity numbers for AMC may not be exactly right, but I think they are close to the reported capacities. The attendance numbers come from NCAA reports. The years where average attendance exceeded capacity is a result of playing some home games at The Omni. For example, in 1985-1986, GT played home games against UNC, NC State, and Illinois there, drawing more than 15,000 to each game. The attendance reported to the NCAA also treats two games in The Omni for the Cotton States Classic as home games, although the game log lists them an Neutral Site.
Here is an AJC article from January 2011 discussing the attendance drop that year, and addressing fan dissatisfaction with Coach Hewitt and the team's performance as contributing factors. Although there was an initial bump for the first year in McCamish, the trend has been declining since then. As I said at the start, there are many reasons in addition to the team's performance, and I'm not one who believes that winning will bring back the sellouts that used to be common.
Tech has done a good job in recent years at getting a large student turnout for some games. I hope they can find a way to make that more common, because I feel like the students improve the atmosphere greatly even if the other seats aren't full. I also noted that both Batt and his deputy have served as principal administrators for Men's Basketball at prior stops, so hopefully they can bring in some additional ideas.
Anyway, I'm going to close my tabs and spreadsheets and quit thinking about this. Hope we'll have a good crowd for the UGa game tonight.
