It’s well documented how bad attendance has been, and I’ve posted the long term numbers on several occasions. You can attend a home game and see firsthand. Many expect attendance to be a lot worse next year if Payne returns for a second season.
When you focus on results the last few years and use U of L women’s basketball as a reference point, the analysis is less clear as far as predictions. Most fans don’t appreciate that women’s attendance has also declined in recent years. Obviously, that can’t be correlated to results on the court.
Here’s a normalized chart I prepared dating back to the 2018-19 season which was Mack’s first year. These are obviously partial year results for 2022-2023, and I omitted the Covid year (2020-2021)…
The effect of Covid was not confined to that one year. Attendance in both sports took a big step down between the years before and after Covid. It was down 13.3% on the women’s side and 20.5% on the men’s. Spanning the five years on the chart, attendance is down 18% for the women and 25% for the men. So much of the decline here is Covid related, and attendance trends between the two sports isn’t much different otherwise. I doubt many folks recognize that.
Reflecting back on what’s transpired the last five seasons in men’s basketball, it's a head scratcher why attendance hasn’t declined further. Mack was hired in 2018 with much fanfare, and the men’s basketball team was ranked #1 nationally during the first two weeks of December 2019. And each week now, we're reminded of the train wreck men's basketball has become just a couple years later.
I present this as a basis to question whether attendance next year will actually decline as much as people think who argue that Payne should be fired this year. No question that attendance will further decline and that we’re probably just delaying the inevitable by not firing him.
As much as I don’t think his termination will soon happen for other reasons, I’m not sure you can justify it based on attendance either. This University has seen attendance decline EVERY year regardless of the circumstances and even in highly successful sports like women’s basketball. You also get to a point of diminishing returns; we’ve already lost so many fans, losing a few more isn’t the incremental hurt it once was. And as hard as it is to comprehend, gradual attrition gets to that core part of the fanbase that buys season tickets whether it makes sense or not. (I know a few of those people.)
My calcs show that an average attendance of a thousand fans per game equates to around a million in operating revenue. As I understand. Payne’s buyout this year is in the vicinity of $8 million and declines by $2 million if we wait a year. I doubt that average paid attendance next year will decline by the two thousand needed to pay a $2 million difference in buyouts.
Hiring a good coach should increase attendance, but there’s every indication you’ll have to pay that coach more money than Payne is making. And you’re paying Payne’s buyout PLUS the new coach’s salary simultaneously which is millions more that you have to offset with more operating revenue. That won’t happen in my estimation. And as I remark, you can’t deposit hypothetical dollars in the bank, just the real stuff.
Barring a Satterfield stroke of luck, I’m afraid this is not a problem that has an immediate and painless fix…
When you focus on results the last few years and use U of L women’s basketball as a reference point, the analysis is less clear as far as predictions. Most fans don’t appreciate that women’s attendance has also declined in recent years. Obviously, that can’t be correlated to results on the court.
Here’s a normalized chart I prepared dating back to the 2018-19 season which was Mack’s first year. These are obviously partial year results for 2022-2023, and I omitted the Covid year (2020-2021)…
The effect of Covid was not confined to that one year. Attendance in both sports took a big step down between the years before and after Covid. It was down 13.3% on the women’s side and 20.5% on the men’s. Spanning the five years on the chart, attendance is down 18% for the women and 25% for the men. So much of the decline here is Covid related, and attendance trends between the two sports isn’t much different otherwise. I doubt many folks recognize that.
Reflecting back on what’s transpired the last five seasons in men’s basketball, it's a head scratcher why attendance hasn’t declined further. Mack was hired in 2018 with much fanfare, and the men’s basketball team was ranked #1 nationally during the first two weeks of December 2019. And each week now, we're reminded of the train wreck men's basketball has become just a couple years later.
I present this as a basis to question whether attendance next year will actually decline as much as people think who argue that Payne should be fired this year. No question that attendance will further decline and that we’re probably just delaying the inevitable by not firing him.
As much as I don’t think his termination will soon happen for other reasons, I’m not sure you can justify it based on attendance either. This University has seen attendance decline EVERY year regardless of the circumstances and even in highly successful sports like women’s basketball. You also get to a point of diminishing returns; we’ve already lost so many fans, losing a few more isn’t the incremental hurt it once was. And as hard as it is to comprehend, gradual attrition gets to that core part of the fanbase that buys season tickets whether it makes sense or not. (I know a few of those people.)
My calcs show that an average attendance of a thousand fans per game equates to around a million in operating revenue. As I understand. Payne’s buyout this year is in the vicinity of $8 million and declines by $2 million if we wait a year. I doubt that average paid attendance next year will decline by the two thousand needed to pay a $2 million difference in buyouts.
Hiring a good coach should increase attendance, but there’s every indication you’ll have to pay that coach more money than Payne is making. And you’re paying Payne’s buyout PLUS the new coach’s salary simultaneously which is millions more that you have to offset with more operating revenue. That won’t happen in my estimation. And as I remark, you can’t deposit hypothetical dollars in the bank, just the real stuff.
Barring a Satterfield stroke of luck, I’m afraid this is not a problem that has an immediate and painless fix…
