Big Ten Tournament attendance?

[tigerchump]

The ONLY factor to worry about is Maryland, which certainly could affect one of the sessions on Friday and the Saturday session. Keep in mind even when Purdue played MSU in the championship game last year, tickets were had pretty cheap (which goes with the notion of the championship game is actually one of the easiest to get).

And the prices you see right now - are probably high. I really doubt that all of the seats except the 400 sections behind the basket are all sold out (that would mean 16,000+ all-session passes). And as soon as schools start getting knocked out, it's more and more tickets on the market.

Keep in mind the tournament did not often sell out in Chicago/Indianapolis - and the Verizon Center is 2,000 seats bigger than Bankers Life.

And Chicago has how many more people than Indy?Counting the suburbs of both cities,Chicago probably has four or five times as many.Of course,a lot of people in both areas arent college sports fans.

 

[lbodel]

And Chicago has how many more people than Indy?Counting the suburbs of both cities,Chicago probably has four or five times as many.Of course,a lot of people in both areas arent college sports fans.

Purdue has around 5,000 alumni in the DC area, 20,000 in Chicago - 60,000 in Chicagoland.

So yeah, the quantities are much different. While there are a number of Purdue fans like me that live in DC and were excited by it, Purdue alums in DC are also much more disconnected unless you really love sports. As I mentioned, I think the Big Ten kind of checked off their checklist of what they had to do for this - I think it could have been a much better and bigger experience. I think they could have partnered much better with Big Ten institutions to get local alumni more involved and active - I received an email from the Purdue Alumni Association about the pre-game spot (nothing about tickets) and that's all the communication I received leading up to and during the tournament.

 

[anilrao08550]

I went to the games Thursday and Friday. The lower 2 levels were pretty full for the sessions (which I believe are where the schools were all allotted tickets). The upper level - was not really at all. I think the listed attendance for our session was 12,000, which was fair (and also probably tickets sold vs. bodies...).

I was going to post my own "critique" of the tournament, but overall - I was not terribly impressed. It seemed a bit amateur-hour at times from a production standpoint (i.e. the "on court" host kept referring to Michigan State as Michigan in the game after ours which led to the MSU fans booing). You wouldn't really expect this from the "premiere" college sports conference (and richest). They had a bunch of Big Ten decals in the Metro station, but staged nothing outside of the Verizon Center - where an entire block was blocked off, but no "Big Ten presence" was there. If you're going to go into 'new' markets, at least make an effort. It's like they didn't even try to make it a cool event or have it be the Big Ten's first splash in the DC area where there are a ton of alums. It just felt like they checked off the to-do list and that was that.

One thing I will add as well - the Big Ten needs to do electronic tickets. This paper-only tickets for the all-session tickets, while I understand it's to make it harder to resell tickets - even though that's a complete reality of a tournament, it's also incredibly annoying in 2016 and probably hurts the overall atmosphere.

This is fair. I went to Friday day session and today on the cheap. 12-13k people yesterday and today it felt like slightly more. I had a good time and didn't feel like the game atmosphere was bad.

 

[lbodel]

This is fair. I went to Friday day session and today on the cheap. 12-13k people yesterday and today it felt like slightly more. I had a good time and didn't feel like the game atmosphere was bad.

The atmosphere was definitely fine - I think a lot of the people who traveled out here stayed for the entire thing vs. packing up and driving home as soon as their team lost. And the Verizon Center is set-up to where the upper level is basically in its own atmosphere - you don't really notice its mostly empty if you're in the first two levels.

That being said, I don't think it's necessarily any different than what they did in Indy/Chicago, but it didn't feel like they did much to really make their dent in this market slash activate the alums in this area. But maybe they simply do not care. And some of that is on the schools - I don't know what each school did in terms of lead up/promoting it to their alums. Not that I'm surprised, but I thought Purdue would do a bit more given the situation, although 3 months ago we weren't the favorite, but still knew it would be a good season. It would have been cool to do some of the famous watering holes out there - i.e. a Harry's bar with some Harry's bartenders making drinks, etc. - or it would have been cool if the Boilermaker Special was out there cruising downtown DC with Purdue fans.

It's just such a great opportunity to get exposure. And it's not all on the Big Ten and it's not all on the individual schools. But if you're going to bring the Big Ten to a non-traditional Big Ten location, I was hoping there'd be more of a Big Ten feel to the experience. Of course, something like this may be good enough in an Indy where that number of people from those schools feels like its taken over downtown Indy and everywhere you go is packed with Big Ten fans. In DC, it barely makes a dent. And obviously in NYC - even less so. Hopefully they make more of an effort next year, both the conference and individual schools.