Please note: I have made a more recent College Basketball Attendance Map; click on the following link, NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball – map of the top 100 drawing teams, 2013-14 season (home games, regular season): #1 Syracuse; #2 Kentucky; #3 Louisville.
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NCAA basketball, top 100-drawing teams, 2009-10
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‘2010 College Basketball Attendance‘, [pdf] from NCAA.org.
At the top of the map page are the top eleven drawing teams (all teams which drew over 15,000 per game last season). Included are the teams’ home arenas, and their capacities. Three of these 11 teams played to full capacity…Attendance leaders the Kentucky Wildcats, who played to 102.6% capacity, drawing 24,111 per game to the 23,500-capacity Rupp Arena in Lexington, KY {metro population, around 463,000}. The 6th-highest-drawing Wisconsin Badgers played to 100% capacity at the 17,230-capacity Kohl Center in Madison, WI {metro population, around 561,000). And the ninth-highest-drawing Kansas Jayhawks played to 100.8% capacity at the 16,300-capacity Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence, KA {metro population, around 116,000}.
There were only three other teams in the list of 100 highest attendances that played to 100% capacity last season…Michigan State, Duke, and Gonzaga. The Michigan State Spartans have now played to 100-percent-capacity at their 14,797-capacity Breslin Center in East Lansing, Michigan for 10 consecutive seasons (since 2000, which was when the Spartans won the second of their 2 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament titles). The 2010 champions Duke Blue Devils once again filled their 9,314-capacity Cameron Indoor Stadium for all their home games, which put them at 53rd-highest-drawing. The perennial March Madness overachievers the Gonzaga Bulldogs are from Spokane, in eastern Washington state, near the Idaho panhandle. They play in a smart and compact 6,000-seat arena called the McCarthey Athletic Center {see this page with interior and exterior shots (Garco Construction Inc. site)}. They were tied for 90th-highest-drawing last season. You just know that arena is an asset for the ‘Zags, because those sell-out crowds make it pretty tough for the visitors. There were a couple teams that drew just below 100% capacity…the 41st-highest-drawing team, south-east Kansas’ Wichita State Shockers (who played to 97.7% capacity), and the Cincinnati, Ohio-based power the Xavier Musketeers, who were the 44th-highest-drawing team last season (playing to 98.8% capacity).
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The circles on the map are all centered on the team’s home arena. They are meant to measure the team’s average crowd size, not the area of the team’s fan base. For example, the part of the big red Louisville Cardinals’ circle that swings north into the state of Indiana is not meant to say that folks from that part of Indiana support Louisville…there is certainly a higher percentage of Indiana Hoosiers fans there (except, probably, for the people that live directly across the Ohio River from the city of Louisville, in and around Clarksville, Indiana, which is part of the Greater Louisville metro area). But I decided to stick to circles radiating out equally, instead of making arbitrary oblong circular blobs that conformed to state boundaries. Besides coastal teams, there was only one instance where I had to put the team’s circle outside the team’s point on the map, and that was in another part of the college-basketball-mad Ohio River Valley, in Cincinnati…because the Xavier Musketeers and the Cincinnati Bearcats both play there. So I moved the Cincinnati Bearcats’ circle off the continental US land mass, and connected it with a line to the city, so that both team’s circles could be properly seen. Another instance where two team’s circles were super-imposed was in the state of North Carolina…the 5th highest-drawing, Chapel Hill-based North Carolina Tar Heels are just 11 miles (18 km.) west of Durham, where the aforementioned Duke Blue Devils play. In this case, Duke’s circle was small enough that it fit into the Tar Heel’s circle, so both could be viewed without moving one circle off its point on the map.
Btw, if you are wondering why there is no team from the state of Massachusetts on the map, well, UMass’ glory days are gone (they only draw around 3,900 these days), Boston College had a poor season (15-16 record), and they drew just 5,317 per game last season, meaning they just missed being in the top 100, and Holy Cross just doesn’t draw so well (less than 2,200). And, over on the west coast, what about USC ? That’s another instance of an off-year resulting in poor crowds. USC were 16-14, and only drew 5,016 per game. UCLA also does not draw so well. For the all-time most successful men’s college basketball program (11 titles, last in 1995), UCLA’s 8,081 per game last season is nothing other than an embarrassment. The jaded LA sports fan can’t be bothered.
Here are the 5 teams that just missed being on the map (#s 101-105)…Boston College, who averaged 5,317 per game; Weber State [Ogden, Utah], who averaged 5,310 per game; Wright State [Dayton, Ohio], who averaged 5,277 per game; Rutgers [Piscataway, New Jersey], who averaged 5,236 per game; Rhode Island [Kingston, RI], who averaged 5,227 per game.
You can see all Division I teams’ average attendances, with teams listed alphabetically, at the bottom of the pdf {again, here}.
Thanks to CBS Sports/College BK, here.
Thanks to Sports-Logos-Screensavers.com, for some of the logos, here.
