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Is the glass half-full if the seats are half-empty?
GREENSBORO — The games are played before empty seats now, oceans of empty seats that stand out on television.
And not just any televisions but big, clear, high-definition TVs that focus a viewer’s attention not just on the basketball players or the race cars or the golf balls flying against blue Pacific skies.
You can see what’s behind the curtain now: seats. Lots of empty seats.
The trend is national. It’s across economic lines and geographic borders. And it’s right in the middle of the Atlantic Coast Conference footprint.
Midway through basketball season in the ACC, attendance is down again. Way down. And it has been for years. News & Record basketball writer Jeff Mills wrote a story last Sunday that showed ACC attendance has fallen for five straight seasons. Ten of the league’s 12 schools are showing declines from last season to now.
The league is aware of the numbers. But a spokesman said the conference will wait until the season is over to address the situation. The biggest games are yet to be played, and the numbers could go up.
But the trend has been heading down for several years now. You can see it inside the arenas where even the top schools aren’t pulling in the fans. Tuesday night’s UNC-Wake game in Winston-Salem was played before thousands of empty seats in the upper deck.
Greg Lynch, a ticket sales director at Boston College, said he saw that and couldn’t believe it.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, that’s UNC playing,’” he said. “North Carolina is playing Wake Forest, and there’s nobody in the upper deck?”
Lynch has seen it at his place, too. BC played N.C. State the next night in front of fewer than 3,000 fans.
Boston College is one of the newer schools in the ACC, a school added through expansion during the league’s heyday. BC was added, in large part, because of its market. But midway through the conference basketball season, the Eagles are averaging only 4,488 fans a night. That’s down more than 800 fans from last season.
Lynch suggested television scheduling has started to have an effect no one could’ve imagined. People simply aren’t able to come to mid-week games the way they once did.
“Affordability is the big thing,” he said. “It’s hard on families. From our standpoint, we have to be creative to get people to come to games on weekdays, really creative.”
BC has kept its ticket prices down and has marketed the big games.
“We have Duke coming in on a Sunday (Feb. 19), and we’ll be jam-packed,” Lynch said. “We’ll be wall-to-wall.”
Duke and Carolina are still the ACC’s big draws on the road, and that will play out in the coming weeks.
Attendance should go up over the last five weeks of the season. But the overall numbers will likely remain down.
There are reasons beyond television and scheduling. Georgia Tech doesn’t even have a home arena this year. Virginia Tech, which sold out Cassell Coliseum for the Duke game Thursday night, is having a terrible season. Seven ACC schools have changed coaches in the past three years.
Miami, like BC, is a historically tough market for college sports. It’s no surprise that the two schools are at or near the bottom in attendance figures and indicators. The ACC is acutely aware of this. And the league is also aware of the opposite, that Duke and North Carolina drive ACC attendance.
That, in part, explains why the league announced Friday that Big Four schools will be playing fewer games against each other in future seasons. Instead of playing State and Wake twice a year, Duke and Carolina will play more schools outside the state once the league expands again, this time to 14 schools.
You want to boost attendance in Miami? Send in the Heels. You want people to jam-pack BC’s 8,600-seat arena? Send the Blue Devils.
It’s all about television now. The contracts drive the money. The league makes more on its deals with ESPN and Raycom than it does when the seats are filled inside Little-john or Lawrence Joel or even Cameron or the Dean Dome.
It’s a new age in sports. Plenty of tickets remain for the Daytona 500 in three weeks, plenty of seats available at NBA arenas across America, PSLs in Charlotte, passes to luxury suites in Pebble Beach and lower-level seats at some of the best college basketball houses in the country.
People are staying home in droves. It’s a problem the ACC, along with every other major conference in America, has been watching for at least five years. There are no easy solutions.
But it’s only February. The big games are yet to come. In that sense, things are going to get better. The question is: Will they get worse again in years to come?
GREENSBORO — The games are played before empty seats now, oceans of empty seats that stand out on television.
And not just any televisions but big, clear, high-definition TVs that focus a viewer’s attention not just on the basketball players or the race cars or the golf balls flying against blue Pacific skies.
You can see what’s behind the curtain now: seats. Lots of empty seats.
The trend is national. It’s across economic lines and geographic borders. And it’s right in the middle of the Atlantic Coast Conference footprint.
Midway through basketball season in the ACC, attendance is down again. Way down. And it has been for years. News & Record basketball writer Jeff Mills wrote a story last Sunday that showed ACC attendance has fallen for five straight seasons. Ten of the league’s 12 schools are showing declines from last season to now.
The league is aware of the numbers. But a spokesman said the conference will wait until the season is over to address the situation. The biggest games are yet to be played, and the numbers could go up.
But the trend has been heading down for several years now. You can see it inside the arenas where even the top schools aren’t pulling in the fans. Tuesday night’s UNC-Wake game in Winston-Salem was played before thousands of empty seats in the upper deck.
Greg Lynch, a ticket sales director at Boston College, said he saw that and couldn’t believe it.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, that’s UNC playing,’” he said. “North Carolina is playing Wake Forest, and there’s nobody in the upper deck?”
Lynch has seen it at his place, too. BC played N.C. State the next night in front of fewer than 3,000 fans.
Boston College is one of the newer schools in the ACC, a school added through expansion during the league’s heyday. BC was added, in large part, because of its market. But midway through the conference basketball season, the Eagles are averaging only 4,488 fans a night. That’s down more than 800 fans from last season.
Lynch suggested television scheduling has started to have an effect no one could’ve imagined. People simply aren’t able to come to mid-week games the way they once did.
“Affordability is the big thing,” he said. “It’s hard on families. From our standpoint, we have to be creative to get people to come to games on weekdays, really creative.”
BC has kept its ticket prices down and has marketed the big games.
“We have Duke coming in on a Sunday (Feb. 19), and we’ll be jam-packed,” Lynch said. “We’ll be wall-to-wall.”
Duke and Carolina are still the ACC’s big draws on the road, and that will play out in the coming weeks.
Attendance should go up over the last five weeks of the season. But the overall numbers will likely remain down.
There are reasons beyond television and scheduling. Georgia Tech doesn’t even have a home arena this year. Virginia Tech, which sold out Cassell Coliseum for the Duke game Thursday night, is having a terrible season. Seven ACC schools have changed coaches in the past three years.
Miami, like BC, is a historically tough market for college sports. It’s no surprise that the two schools are at or near the bottom in attendance figures and indicators. The ACC is acutely aware of this. And the league is also aware of the opposite, that Duke and North Carolina drive ACC attendance.
That, in part, explains why the league announced Friday that Big Four schools will be playing fewer games against each other in future seasons. Instead of playing State and Wake twice a year, Duke and Carolina will play more schools outside the state once the league expands again, this time to 14 schools.
You want to boost attendance in Miami? Send in the Heels. You want people to jam-pack BC’s 8,600-seat arena? Send the Blue Devils.
It’s all about television now. The contracts drive the money. The league makes more on its deals with ESPN and Raycom than it does when the seats are filled inside Little-john or Lawrence Joel or even Cameron or the Dean Dome.
It’s a new age in sports. Plenty of tickets remain for the Daytona 500 in three weeks, plenty of seats available at NBA arenas across America, PSLs in Charlotte, passes to luxury suites in Pebble Beach and lower-level seats at some of the best college basketball houses in the country.
People are staying home in droves. It’s a problem the ACC, along with every other major conference in America, has been watching for at least five years. There are no easy solutions.
But it’s only February. The big games are yet to come. In that sense, things are going to get better. The question is: Will they get worse again in years to come?
