We need a bigger basketball arena!
Posted by kj on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
AKA They’re numbers and they’re MSU basketball-related, so I must analyze them.
Despite once again selling out every home game, MSU ranked just 17th in the nation in average home attendance this season (from the page I’ve linked to, there’s a link to a Word file with all the details). This is, of course, a function of the relatively small size (14,759) of the Breslin Center relative to the arenas of other major programs. What’s say we knock out a wall and add some more bleachers?
Other attendance nuggets:
- MSU ranked 8th in the nation in average attendance for all games (home/road/neutral). Helps that we played only one true road game in nonconference play, while playing several nonconference games in NBA-sized arenas.
- The Big Ten ranked 1st in the nation in average home attendance for the 32nd consecutive season. (Solid evidence for the conclusion of Hubert’s theory on conference recruiting/standards.)
- Five of the top 17 teams in average home attendance hailed from the Big Ten.
Here’s a complete list of Big Ten average home attendance figures (capacity figures, courtesy of this article, are in brackets):
- Wisconsin: 17,190 [17,142]
- Indiana: 16,876 [17,456]
- Illinois: 16,618 [16,618]
- Ohio State: 16,587 [19,500]
- Michigan State: 14,759 [14,759]
- Minnesota: 12,452 [14,625]
- Purdue: 12,345 [14,123]
- Iowa: 10,761 [15,500]
- Michigan: 10,034 [13,751]
- Penn State: 8,041 [15,261]
- Northwestern: 4,579 [8,117]
I’d expect that Purdue number to go up next year. And kudos to Illini fans for selling out all their games despite the team’s substandard results this past season.
Site News
- I’ve added a permanent page to the list of links at the top of the site with a projection of the team’s roster for the next five seasons. I’ll update this page as events warrant for future reference.
- The primary address for this site has changed from the clunky “spartansweblog.wordpress.com” to the sleeker “spartansweblog.com.” For now, the change is just a cosmetic one and the old address will still get you here. Eventually, I’m planning to move off the free Wordpress service to a paid hosting service to increase flexibility in terms of formatting and other blogging features. So you might as well update your bookmarks/links now to the shorter address. That having been said, it’s an open question when I’ll actually work up the gumption to move the site. I’ve barely learned how to do some simple HTML coding, let alone deal with the acronyms like CSS and FTP that keep showing up when I research what’s involved with paid hosting services. (With a little more work, I could have turned this in to an excellent “I’m just a caveman” spoof.)
- This is my 200th post! It’s a bicentennial!
Filed in big ten, general, michigan state basketball
