Open letter to LSU Basketball student faithful

i think there are two ways to look at it.

one is the state of baseball and basketball at LSU right now.

and the other is if the programs were at the same success level, how would their popularity compare?

my strong opinion is that in the second scenario basketball would win out.

 

<--- Has been at the Assembly Center back in the Chris Jackson and Shaq era. It was packed and loud. Even had a decible meter in there measuring the loudness. If you put the product on the court, they will come.

 

LSU athletic director Joe Alleva wants to increase basketball attendance | LSU Beat - NOLA.com

LSU averages 8977 tickets sold per men's home game. But the actual attendance is around 4401. Yeah LSU basketball is more popular than baseball. :dis:

 

It's definitely not more popular that baseball and hasn't been for years. But if they ever win consistently and make nice runs into the tourney each year, I guarantee you it could be just as popular as baseball. And if they ever win it all like the baseball team has - forget about it.

LSU baseball (and the fan support) is the gold standard for college baseball. But we have an unbelievable winning tradition and so LSU fans are even greater when you have a constant winner.

Dale Brown took LSU to 10 straight NCAA tournaments at one time and the PMAC was pretty awesome during that stretch. You know, they had the Deaf Dome meter, etc. Whether it consistently worked or not is another thing. But the place used to be rocking and consistently drew big crowds. Dick Vitale didn't give it the name Deaf Dome for nothing. When I had looked at old attendance records from 1978-1992 (15 years for you math wizards), LSU was only outside of the top 25 in average attendance twice. And those two years were still inside the top 30. They finished in the top 10 for a number of years beating out places like Kansas, etc. and usually were in the top 15 area. And that was for a pretty long stretch.

Dale Brown (no matter what you thought of him) was an iconic college basketball coach. He created excitement and brought in superstars, exciting players, foreign guys, etc. But most of his teams were winners as well and the fans supported a consistent winner. I don't think LSU has been able to match the excitement that existed for the majority of the Dale Brown era because we haven't really been consistent like we were back then. But it can be exciting again with some consistency.

 

Last year the basketball and baseball programs were both very successful and the total attendance numbers were not even close. Baseball was more than double.

 

Basketball average attendance was 8500. Baseball did not double that.

 

Baseball has way more home games. If you spread the basketball season over 40 games then their average would be like 1000 people. Total attendance is what matters and the only way to fairly compare.

 

No comparing average attendance is the most sensible thing. Do you think baseball would have the same total attendance if they only had 22 home games?

Even using average attendance kind of skews the result to baseball where there are 15 SEC games. Basketball had average SEC attendance of over 12,000, but that is only 8 of the 21 games.

 

That is # of tickets sold per game not attendance. People are buying tickets but not showing up. I think that's worse than not showing up period. The article says this season there are on average 4500 no-shows at each game. That is astounding and speaks volumes of the fan support.

 

No because there would be more sellouts limiting the amount that could attend games. If the stadium were not a limiting factor then the per game average would go up. The total attendance would stay about the same.

Its simple supply and demand. Say the demand for baseball is 100,000 people that want to attend a baseball game. In a 10 game season there will be an average of 10,000 fans per game. If you double the season to 20 games you thin the average crowd for each game to 5,000. Opposite happens if you cut the games to 5. Avg goes to 20,000. In each case the total attendance remains the same.