Oklahoma State Posts Worst Basketball Attendance Since GIA Expanded

The NCAA men’s basketball attendance numbers were unveiled this week. There are innumerable ways to look at this data, but I decided the one that most interests me is what OSU’s attendance has looked like since Travis Ford took over.

In 2015, OSU averaged 7,897 (good for 57th in the country, just behind Penn State and Mizzou). The D1 average was 4,754 (good job, OSU!). The Big 12 average was 10,181 (bad job, OSU!). Here’s a look at the recent history of OSU compared to those two numbers.

So as NCAA attendance has gone down slightly, OSU’s has gone down significantly since Ford’s first year in 2008-09. Big 12 average attendance overall has also remained very steady.

I realized, after looking at this, it gets much worse.

Here’s OSU’s basketball attendance at GIA every year since it expanded for the 2000-01 season. That first figure you see (the one in 2000 that 2015 was approaching) is for old GIA. The small one. The one that held just over 6,000 people.

College basketball attendance is, of course, not the lone indicator of a healthy basketball program[1. Here’s every Big 12 arena by capacity, which I thought was intriguing.] (hi, Duke), but for a program that is one of five tournament teams that reported financial losses, being 58 percent full certainly isn’t a good thing.