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Message: [QUOTE="freescooter, post: 4349982, member: 1023"] Yeah not so much. Here’s what the big drivers were: 1. Attendance was dropping and had been for at least 5-6 years. 2. Attendance in 2014 was basically flat at 10,300 or so. 2015 it actually went up a bit, which is typical after a NC. then you are right, it went down again but stayed around 10,000 in 2016. Then in 2017 and 2018 it cratered, but take a guess what else cratered in those years. Those were the last 2 Ollie seasons when we lost games to Wagner and Northeastern, and set a record for losing blowouts. 2019 Hurley arrived and attendance clicked up to 8600+- then in 2020 the last Big AAC year and when were were back in consideration for the Tournament and lo and behold, attendance bounced up to just under 10,000 again (9,890 I think). 2021 was the COVID year so no numbers but a pulse with a tourney bid and 2022 saw a jump again to 10,345. But still way below the 2006 peak, and despite a pretty solid team and the return to live games and the New Big East, it was BELOW 2015 and 2016. Using your logic, more fans attended games when We were in the AAC than in the NEWBIE. But in reality more fans attend games when the team is good than when it is just ok or bad. The conference might have a marginal impact but the quality of OUR team is the real driver. I also suspect, though I didn’t do any analysis to prove it, that there is a season to season carryover. So 2015 wasn’t that good a team, but there was some positive vibes from winning the title which brought more fans to see them the next season. The 2010 team was sort of meh, so attendance went down in 2011 and didn’t rebound until later in the season. Some thing happened in 2020, I imagine…a team that looked to be decidedly average suddenly caught fire so attendance rebounded late in the year. So how’s that for providing an argument and backing it up with data which pretty clearly refutes your opinion unsupported by a more thorough look at the facts? As I said in my first post, you cherry picked data and argued that attendance cratered because of the AAC. The truth is attendance remained pretty much within the range it had been in the later years of the Calhoun regime including the National Championship year by the way. Then when the team crashed attendance followed suit. When the team recover, attendance recovered. That’s what the actual data show and that’s pretty consistent with the general rule of thumb about sports teams. [/QUOTE]

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