College Basketball Thread 2018

It makes perfect sense if you are familiar with Holly Warlick's ongoing attempt to become the Gene Bartow of women's hoops.

 

After UGA lost to Ole Miss last night, Tom Crean said "It's all my fault" and then threw his team under a steamroller. His AD is out there saying he was taken out of context. See if you can figure out how to take this out of context:

“It’s all on me,” he said. “Because I’m the one who decided to keep these guys. It’s all on me. And I get it. Because the last thing I can do, with making decisions, on keeping guys in the program in the spring, is now get overly mad at them because I’m the one who made the decision. So I live with that every day.”

http://kentuckysportsradio.com/bask...llowing-georgias-loss-today-were-interesting/

 

I watched Indiana-Iowa and Dakich kept talking about "18,000 people" in the building. Then I read a gamer in the Daily Hoosier that said the actual crowd was about 14,000. I know college football attendance has fallen despite the efforts made to pad the crowds. I assume the same phenomena has occurred in college basketball.

Also, Romeo Langford is 6'6" and a 27% three point shooter and is supposed to be a lottery pick. How can an NBA team use a lottery pick on a shooting guard who can not shoot?

 

SO many empty seats in college basketball and football now — outside of the upper elite. Two forces at work. The TV contracts give the schools all the cash but at a heavy price.

No one likes Friday night Big Ten games. No one. Fans go high school first or try convincing a wife after a long week at work to schlepp it in the cold for some college basketball game. Same for football. No one likes it but it’s what the BTN wants.

TV then impacts so much from an environment of the venue. I like watching 11 AM college football but all my friends with actual tickets hate it. That’s pretty much a 7 AM to 6 PM commitment to sit through a game with an hour of commercial breaks/halftime.

Baseball is going through it. The NFL is going through it.

High school sports are really getting hit. Ten years ago, in the same city I live in now, I was covering basketball games in a packed gym. Now these were showdowns with multiple Division I kids. This year, I volunteer at the games with multiple Division I kids and top 5 ranked programs. Gym is half full. It’s a new paradigm. Thanks to social media, more options for young people.

Asked my son why he doesn’t go to the basketball games. He said after spending all that time at school each week (and he is heavily involved), the last thing he wants to do is see all those people for another two hours. Fair enough.

It’s the day of reckoning in live sports. As our society evolves, it’s clear that people will only go to watch, en masse, the absolute best.

 

One thing I think that is done to inflate attendance in colleges is to inflate the student attendance. A school with lots of empty eats sells student season tickets for a nominal rate like $25 for six football games. So the the school sells 6,000 or 7,000 tickets to kids who will go to the game against the chief rival and maybe another game or two. But the school counts all the ticket sales as part of attendance. I even think at some schools the purcahse of the tickets is required as part of the student fee.

But I see some college games with large announced attendances and a lot of empty seats.

 

If that's a strategy, it's been going on a long time. I went to an SEC school in the 1990s and football student tickets were $3. They went up to $6 my second or third year.
All the other sports, including basketball, were free.

 

How many students did they let in, though?

When I was in college in the 70's and 80's they would limit the number of student seats. When I was at Indiana there was a limit on the number of student tickets. You could not get tickets to all the games and there was a line the day tickets went on sale. At some point they sold out during the day and that was it.

And if you were getting into basketball games free that tells me you went somewhere in the SEC other than Kentucky and there were lots of empty seats.

 

So ... Mike Trout?

 

It definitely wasn't the whole arena but it was a good bit of one side reserved for students. It was general admission. Just show up, show your student ID and you're in. We always had pretty good seats. So maybe a couple thousand in a 13,000-seat arena.
This was LSU in the mid-90s, so demand for basketball wasn't exactly on par with Kentucky or Indiana at their peak. When I was there we had home games against Kentucky (twice) and UCLA the years they won the national title and the student sections were packed. For the UCLA game in 1994-95, I remember sitting through a women's game because we were afraid we wouldn't get seats if we showed up later. The rest of the time we strolled up a few minutes before tip off.

For baseball, it was free but you had to go before the game and get tickets. IIRC the window opened at 5 for a 7 p.m. game, and there was usually a line for the SEC games. Smaller stadium and they always sold out, so they probably didn't reserve more than 500 or 1,000 tickets for students.

 

Few things nicer than Kentucky and Duke losing on the same night, and Carolina losing the night before.

 

Seeing Duke get lit up once a year like this restores my faith in mankind.

 

Anyone else think McCounaghey is one of the coolest guys in the world?
Kick ass actor who gives enough to UT that he's sitting on the end of the bench?