MORGANTOWN — It was sort of a subtle point made by Neal Brown late Thursday night, in the moments following West Virginia’s 43-40 victory against Baylor.
He sort of threw it in there in between comments of Tony Mathis Jr. and Kaden Prather being the stars of the game and how the ball is just now beginning to bounce in the Mountaineers’ favor.
If you weren’t paying attention, you may have missed it, but we sure didn’t.
“The people that were here tonight, they saw a hell of a football game,” Brown began. “The people that weren’t, they’re probably going to be disappointed they didn’t see it.”
Milan Puskar Stadium was far from full Thursday. The announced crowd of 45,000 and change — the stadium seats 60,000 — we believe a few people were counted twice to reach that figure.
In any case, a head football coach generally doesn’t make a comment like that unless he looks around and the number of empty seats makes some sort of lasting impression on him.
We fast forward to Friday night inside the WVU Coliseum, where the men’s basketball team was being unveiled to the public for the first time this season at the annual Gold-Blue Debut.
The attendance — admission and parking were free — would have been standing-room only for a Sunday service at Christmas, except the Coliseum isn’t a church and hoops coach Bob Huggins certainly wasn’t preaching about baby Jesus.
Now, obviously we’re starting a conversation here about WVU fan support, and let me start by saying I do not have a dog in that fight personally.
It’s your money and your time, and I’m not going to judge how you spend either.
But, if I’m WVU athletic director Shane Lyons, I’m starting to get very concerned, because diminishing attendance figures at your two best money-making sports holds a lot more meaning than just fewer sales of beer and hot dogs.
After all, no athletic director comes into a new school, sits down at their desk for the first time and thinks, “What can we do to lower attendance and tick off our fans?”
Make no mistake, Lyons’ own job security is very much tied to how the overall fan base likes or dislikes the directions the football and men’s basketball teams are heading.
And having only 45,293 show up for a nationally-televised Thursday night football game isn’t a good indicator your fan base is a happy one.
To throw some facts out here, that’s the lowest single attendance at Milan Puskar Stadium (not counting the COVID-19 season) since Nov. 28, 2015.
Brown was a rookie head coach at Troy then, that’s how long it’s been.
WVU is averaging 49,394 per home game so far, just shy of a 5% drop from last season’s average, which saw a 7.7% drop compared to the 2019 season.
In men’s hoops, the 2021-22 average attendance in the Coliseum dropped 6.2% compared to 2019-20 (again, not counting the COVID-19 year).
WVU finished 16-17 last season, was in last place in the Big 12 and missed out on a postseason tournament for the first time since 2013.
The Mountaineers were picked to finish ninth in the conference this season, not exactly a giant boost of confidence for early-season expectations, hence the sparse showing at the Gold-Blue Debut.
The bigger picture here is generally when attendance begins to drop, so do future season-ticket sales, as well as donations to the athletic department.
That, too, is very much tied to Lyons’ job security, because the cost of running a major college athletic department, as well as coaching salaries, sure aren’t going down.
To be fair here, it’s not exactly like the WVU athletic department is teetering on going broke, and its highly doubtful Milan Puskar Stadium will ever look like the old Temple home crowds at Veteran’s Stadium in the Big East days.
Yet, the numbers are telling us the school’s top programs are leaning closer to mediocrity than they are the elite.
Outside of the men’s soccer program, the 2021-22 school year was a dud for WVU athletics.
A second consecutive year of that is not the headlines Lyons or anyone at WVU wants to see.
And, so far, to steal a line from Brown, maybe the WVU fan base is missing a hell of a game. Or maybe they’re not missing anything at all. Time will tell.
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