Games Tonight - 11/10/21

ESPN reports 2696.

However:
A couple comments about attendance.

I used to pay a fair bit of attention to attendance, monitoring the annual numbers reported by the NCAA although I've not followed it as closely recently. (Obviously, Covid threw a wrench into attendance.)

I've also attended a wide variety of venues and sometimes take note of the attendance. An arena that is mostly empty often holds a few more people than one might guess. I've been in some arenas that looked almost empty. Before counting, my gut said there were a couple dozen people in the stands. Then I'd start counting and get to a couple hundred and realize that appearances can be deceiving.

There is also a curious artifact of the way that tickets are normally allocated. This is something I think the school should address, but I haven't seen any interest in solving the problem. Curiously, Uconn is one of the more egregious examples of this odd phenomenon. The cameras understandably focus on the play on the court, but pick up shots of the crowd naturally. However, other than the relatively rare deliberate pans of the crowd, TV shots rarely cover a substantial portion of the crowd.

There are two main shots — a shot of the home team huddling, where you can see the bench players and the crowd immediately behind the bench, and a shot of the visiting team, with the crowd behind them. Many schools, UConn included, reserve a block of seats immediately behind the visitors bench for visitors who travel. In many cases, the number of seats reserved far exceeds the number of fans who show up. Obviously, when we are talking about teams like South Carolina, there will be a full section. For many teams, it is only a handful of fans willing to travel (or who happen to live in Connecticut) who take advantage of the seats. As a result, the TV shot shows a lot of empty seats when ever they cut to the visitors bench. (Fort Hays State had a decent contingent.)

This can mean that the arena is 95% full, while TV shots are showing a block of empty seats on a regular basis. (I don't want to get too far off topic but I've advocated that the school should have the right to move people into those seats if they aren't filled a few minutes after tipoff if only for the visual.)

A second reason depends on how the venue reports attendance. This two main ways a school can report. They can report tickets "sold" (in quotes because some schools engage in giveaways) or they can use the turnstile count. A defense can be made of both practices. If you want to measure support for your team, someone who buys a ticket but has a scheduling conflict and can't show up, arguably counts as a measure of support. That's a justification for counting tickets distributed. You can also make the argument that you'd like to know many people are actually in the arena and that's an argument for the turnstile count.

The turnstile count is always less than or equal to the number of tickets distributed (ignoring the fact that a small handful of people such as arena staff are in the building but did not buy tickets). In many cases, the difference will be small but there are some situations where the difference can be considerable.

Back when Tennessee mattered, I spent some time looking into their attendance, because they were typically reporting the highest attendance in the country. They most certainly did have enormous support, but they also had a significant difference between the ticket count and turnstile. I have to give Tennessee credit for reporting both values. Very few schools do so. I'm not aware that UConn does so. In the case of UConn, I suspect that the difference is small. A season-ticket holder may not be able to make it to some game. However, in the case of Tennessee, my recollection is that the difference between ticket count and turnstile count was often 3000 or more. Why? Their administration actively tried to promote the game, which included outright giveaways of tickets, and sometimes two tickets for the price of one. Psychology and economics tell us that if you are given a ticket for free, you are less inclined to make sure you go to the event than if you actually paid for it. And even more obvious case is if someone offers you two tickets for the price of one, you probably are going to turn down the second even if you only want one, and maybe I'll give it to somebody else but maybe you will just not use it. (Don't get me wrong I applaud Tennessee's marketing, I'm just pointing out that it can lead to curious results.)

The difference of 3000 between tickets and turnstile applied to many games with the notable exception of UConn games. No one in Tennessee is going to miss the chance to see that game, so the difference between tickets and turnstile was considerably smaller in that game.

I have a vague recollection that Tennessee switched to reporting turnstile rather than ticket count, but when Tennessee faded from relevance, I stopped paying attention so I honestly do not know what their current practice is. Nor do I know what Stanford's practice is. The difference between the 2696 reported, and a fan's estimate of crowd size is definitely partially due to the first thing I talked about, but may also be a real difference if they are reporting tickets distributed rather than turnstile.