This Is Piss Poor Coverage From The Dallas Morning News

Do you really need the attendance number? Call the arena; I think fire codes require that sort of thing to be documented.

 

Hey, Shawn-o... quit while you're behind.

 

(In the tune of The Allman Brothers) ... Lord I was born a Grambling fan ...

 

The official attendance was listed as zero in the box score, as it was all of the tournament games. Not uncommon for tournaments of any type, since they usually count session attendance and not individual games.
FWIW, the attendance for the Grambling-ASU game two weeks ago in Grambling was listed at 1,329. When they played in Montgomery in January, it was 829. On the women's side, 1,990 people were at the Prairie View-Southern game in Texas on March 5 and 279 attended their January game in Baton Rouge.
So even if you take the higher numbers and say most of the fans stuck around for both games, you're looking at MAYBE 2,000 people attending the men's championship game.

 

Some schools do an OK job. Alabama State's site is as good as anyone's on any level. Jackson State does a fair job, too. Most of the rest are, generously put, hit or miss. It's most apparent on the minor sports. We can't run SWAC baseball standings (and college baseball is big here, at least with the SEC and C-USA) because it's often two or three days before they update the scores on their sites. The last baseball game the main SWAC site has a box score for is from Feb. 27.
Like you said, I realize a lot of the SIDs hold down other jobs in their respective athletic departments. They're overworked in most cases. And it's still basketball season in the minds of a lot of folks. I get that. But Feb. 27?

 

SWAC fans care about football, particularly the "Classic" matchups that bring the teams to cities with large HBCU alumni bases. Grambling-SU football in New Orleans is an event. The Magic City Classic is an event. The Orange Blossom Classic is an event.

Everything else is glorified D-II in terms of fan interest, including most SWAC games that aren't classics.

 

Honestly, the SWAC would be much better off if they dropped down to D-II. They're in their own little world in D-I, never really competing for anything outside of their borders and skating by on a shoestring budget to maintain some semblance of status. The only benefit they get from being D-I is the ability to schedule football and basketball games against powerhouses in exchange for a fat paycheck that only sustains what they already have. They don't use the money to improve their facilities, it just gets them through the year like a hobo eating a soup kitchen sandwich.

 

I'd add that it doesn't help the classics be more attractive either. The Bayou Classic would still be the Bayou Classic if Grambling and Southern were D-II. Morehouse-Tuskegee drew 32,000 people this year for a D-II game. It's an event because of the historic importance of the schools, not because the D-I/D-II label.

 

I think I just saw this reposted in the "Dear Dimwit on the Phone" thread.

 

The stadium Tuskegee-Morehouse is played in holds fewer than 20,000 - far from the 32,215 listed in the box score from 2010 - and the last couple of years it's been about 75 percent full. The organizers and the SIAC like to play up the attendance and include an inflated number of tailgaters in that.

That said, it is a good example of how well a D-II game can draw when the schools forget about D-I aspirations and simply play up a good rivalry.

 

I saw that attendance figure included tailgaters. That gave me a chuckle. My only question is, do the tailgaters pay for a ticket?

 

I graduated from Jackson State back in 2006. The atmosphere at games were cool like the tailgating and band. The football, however, was much to be desired.

But you guys are right about there needs to be other activities surrounding football games or basketball games to draw fan interest. A lot of the folks who I went to school with say the same thing as well.