FanPost

Attendance Question... (are we really as much of a basketball school as we think?)

Syracuse football average attendance: 37,953 (capacity for football is 49,262)

Syracuse basketball average attendance: 23,618 (capacity for basketball is 34,616+)

So it suffices that there are empty seats for both football and basketball games, right? Neither is at capacity most of the time. My question is simple: If Syracuse is a "basketball school" (which people uniformly seem to agree that it is), why do the football games still outdraw the basketball games by a wide margin?

The obvious answer is that the games against the likes of Colgate and Eastern Michigan in November and December and/or weeknight games drive down basketball's numbers. But even if you look at only our "big games," the numbers are still substantially lower:

#10 Florida on Friday Dec. 2nd @ 7PM - 24,459

#20 Marquette on Saturday Jan. 7th @ 4PM - 25,412

West Virginia on Saturday Jan. 28th @ 1PM - 28,740

#12 Georgetown on Wednesday Feb. 8th @ 7PM - 27,820

UCONN on Saturday Feb. 11th @ 1PM - 33,430

#19 Louisville on Saturday March 3rd @ 4PM - 33,205

So our 6 biggest games, all of which we were ranked in the Top 10 for, all against teams that were currently (or had recently been ranked in the top 25) averaged: 28,844...

Which means there were plenty of seats available and that a lot less people came out for big-time basketball games than for an "average" football game.

Again, I realize there are a lot more basketball games than football games, so football games might be perceived as more "special" or more of an "event," or at the very least, scarcity helps drive interest. And I also realize that watching football in a stadium a better experience for spectators than watching basketball in a stadium. And that there are more "good" seats in the Dome for football than there are for basketball.

But still...

Am I the only one who is surprised and confused by these numbers? For all the talk about SU football fans being fair-weather fans (or if we're being less polite, shitty fans), more of them show up for football games (by a significant margin) than they do for basketball games, despite the fact that the basketball team is much much better and plays much much better teams.

Can someone explain this to me? Seriously. I'm not trying to make any kind of statement here. I'm just confused by the numbers. Help me understand.