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Funny how they shift things around like that when attendance has been pretty static ever since the Bren opened. I'm pretty sure that entire side was for students when I was in school. I don't know what difference it'll make. Wherever the student section is, I can't imagine that the student body has changed significantly to the pro sports side from my time, but I bet the steps to the library are crowded as ever on a Friday night, eh?

Eateralum86 wrote:

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Again, this is an athletic department failure.

Let's be fair. Name a non-football school on the west coast, except Gonzaga, that has good student attendance at basketball games. I certainly can't name another school in the Big West that does well at the ticket office. You also are not factoring in that when you were a student (and to a lesser extent, when I was a student), the Big West was a viable multi-bid conference. It was to the benefit of the member schools to schedule tough OOC opponents, which drew fans to games, because they stood a good chance at getting an at-large bid. Also, if I'm not mistaken, UCI was the only non-football school in the conference back then. Rather than saying the athletic department has failed, maybe the conference as a whole has come down to Irvine's level. The committed schools moved on to the WAC and the complacent schools stuck around, filling the void with transient D2 programs looking to move up.

If I were a basketball recruit (if you ever saw me, that would be the funniest joke ever), I can't say that any Big West team would be attractive to me. You get a conference that can't attract more than the occasional JC transfer, and you get a conference of perpetual mediocre performance on the court. Combine that with a student body who typically goes trolling for dates in the library, and you're just simply gonna' be hard pressed to get attendance no matter what you do.

Overall, I've got to give props to the Irvine athletic department for doing some amazing things with little resources ever since Dan Guerrero and Ralph Cicerone set foot on campus. It's early to tell, but I've got faith in Izzi to continue the overall upward trend. But I still think basketball is gonna' suck in both performance and attendance for a good long time.