PatAg said:

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agforlife97 said:

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Hop said:

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94chem said:

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By the time Turgeon left, the team had become difficult to watch. The first round exit against FSU in his final year was a mercy killing. Buzz is building something. Turgeon was slowly tearing something down. If this is the floor, good times are on the way. We are already better than 6 of Kennedy's 8 teams.

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In his last two seasons combined, Turgeon went 48-19 and finished in 2nd and 3rd place respectively in each of his last two years. Anybody that says the teams were tough to watch isnt a college basketball fan.

I agree that Turgeon wasn't stockpiling young talent, but he brought in enough talent to go to the NCAA's every year and left A&M with a 97-40 record in a very competitive basketball conference.

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I freely admit that I'm not a great basketball fan. The only way I'll watch basketball is if it's an A&M team that's actually fun to watch. So that really narrows it down. BCG had a few teams that could score, and that was fun to watch. Turgeon didn't. His teams played great defense but flat out sucked offensively.

I think Buzz will get there. When BCG had his Acie Law teams, Reed was packed at least some of the time. Once Buzz gets some talent, I think he can do the same or better.

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BCG teams were all about hard defense, and clutch playmaking on offense. The year we had JJ and AK playing well together helped our offense a lot but it was stll never what I call a team that could score.

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Well, we had guys that could consistently hit point blank layups at least.

I still don't understand how someone can play basketball their whole life and still suck at shooting, especially free throws. We should never recruit players that can't shoot. No one wants to watch a basketball team with no shooting ability. Maybe someone could take a note on that before complaining about attendance.

Proposition Joe said:

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And A&M isnt the only school with those discrepancies.

Either we go by all anecdotal reports from fanbases on how "good" or "bad" their attendance is, or we go by the data.

Last night alone you had some posters saying it was 70% blue with others saying it was as low as 10%. People have faulty memories and make faulty observations.

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I think you missed the point. There is always a discrepancy between butts and reported attendance. You aren't comparing actual and reported. You're comparing reported and reported. And the number of reported is necessarily going to be higher due to the significant increase in season tickets sold between the beginning of the BCG era and the end of the Turge era.

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I don't think attendance is an A&M thing. Basketball is just not as popular in the south. And when you've sucked for 95 percent of your history or at least been blah, generations of fans have grown up not caring. That is VERY hard to combat.

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yep

it's going to take a few years of sweet 16 level basketball or a really special season, like a final 4 run, to start to change the fans' outlook on hoops at Texas A&M.

and to compound matters, the SEC is not full of basketball powers or texas schools, so the draw based on opponent is not as enticing for A&M fans as it was when we were in the big12 playing texas, baylor, tech, ok st, ou, kansas, k st etc.... for A&M fans those big 12 schools are overall a better basketball draw than the collection of sec schools we play such as ole miss, miss st, bama, auburn, lsu, Arkansas, vandy, etc, even with Kentucky included...

The SEC strategically, likely as part of revenue discussions with ESPN, made the decision to focus on making basketball competitive. I would say the early results from that effort are B+ with many stronger coaching staffs now in place. This year the conference might not get as much traction on the strategyheard one talking head predicting only four NCAAT bidsbut if they keep at it we likely will enjoy better games and better attendance plus it's a way to move the needle on revenue (tickets, concessions, NCAAT money, media revenue all have upsides from current.)

Looking forward to how we work on this second revenue sport as a key program.

The problem with taking that analytical approach is that you have to ignore the actual factual data we have and instead go based on, what, eye-witness accounts from every team's fan message board, to determine if our attendance is good or bad compared to others?

Because every fan message board outside of Kansas/Kentucky/bluebloods have posts complaining about attendance.

Let's get someone on creating a formula that uses the hard data, but then all of us will fill out a spreadsheet of what we remember the attendance being, and then accounting for human error and adjusting for standard Aggie pessimism the formula will give us an estimated actual.

Sounds like a good offseason project for someone.

Proposition Joe said:

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The problem with taking that analytical approach is that you have to ignore the actual factual data we have and instead go based on, what, eye-witness accounts from every team's fan message board, to determine if our attendance is good or bad compared to others?

Because every fan message board outside of Kansas/Kentucky/bluebloods have posts complaining about attendance.

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I don't know what you're talking about. I was talking about the comparison of attendance from the BCG era to the Turge era. The facts are that we experienced a big jump in season ticket sales during that timeframe which resulted in higher reported attendance numbers in the Turge era. This isn't anecdotal or supposition, those are facts.

The thing that skews actual vs reported attendance is season tickets. Higher season ticket sales result in higher discrepancies between actual and reported. That's it.

I understand what you are saying, but then what -- we should say attendance was worse than reported because we had more season ticket sales (where the holders didn't attend 100% of the time)?

I know it's not you pushingit, but that's a long way to go to try and push a narrative that attendance was declining under a coach... If attendance is down, you can say it was down... If it was up, you just say that was mainly season ticket/group/miniplan sales and not actual butts in seats.

Kinda seems like actually just looking at the attendance figures is a lot better for comparisons sake.

My take is 9,000 in an arena that has 11,000 decent seats and 13,888 record attendance (1,000 above listed capacity) is good for a program that has been inconsistent.

But it is a beginning not a destination. Now what?

1. I expect recruiting to make the team better and relatively quickly. I don't think Buzz will have four one-and-dones on the floor each year, though...

2. As presented earlier, there is every reason to expect conference play to continue to improve in quality and competitiveness. The SEC was darn near awful in basketball during the BK years and I'll suggest that had zero to do with Kennedy.

3. I also see with my own eyes a coaching approach that seems effective at least in turning out better play and based on meaningful, mostly objective, analysis. I think the conundrum is whether it scales to players with elite offensive playmaking talent.

It's only an 11% improvement to go from 9K to 10K and another 10% to 11K or what we might call "good sight line" capacity. At least there aren't pillars in the way like in G. Rollie...

I think in three years the attendance problem is solved...

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It's not helpful when your factual annual data doesn't provide any relevant context.

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Except it's the only truly factual data we have. The rest is anecdotal "what I remember when I looked in the stands 10 years ago".

So if you are going to try and make this point that attendance was declining and you want to completely ignore the actual factual annual data, then I'd hope you have something more concrete then what you remember sitting in the stands 10+ years ago... Otherwise it's probably not a very solid point to try and make.

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The run up in the attendance numbers you are analyzing on an annual basis comes from the historic 2007 season and the season tickets sold after that season. But it is clear that the excitement waned for some reason during the Turgeon era because attendance consistently declined after that first year in 2008

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We averaged 9400+ in Turgeon's second year.

We averaged 9800+ in Turgeon's third year.

Overall attendance dipped because we played 2 less home games.

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despite playing the same Big 12 Rivalry games.

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Except they weren't the same. In 2011 when average attendance actually took a significant dip, we didn't play one of the biggest draws in the entire nation at home -- Kansas. We also had Texas on a weeknight instead of a weekend.

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Why? Well, it wasn't for lack of winning...24.5 wins a season in Turgeon era.

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You keep referencing win totals because you want to purposely ignore what actually matters -- ranking. You can win 100 games playing cupcake opponents and no one is going to care unless you're ranked.

If you took the time to look at the rankings you'd find that half the time under Turrgeon we weren't even ranked in the Top 25.

Less than 1/3rd of the time were we ranked in the Top 20.


In Billy Clyde's historical 2007 season you want to know how often we were ranked outside the Top 20?

Not once.

We spent 11 of the 19 ranked weeks inside the TOP TEN. Never fell out of the Top 15.


So only someone being purposely obtuse and "dug in" on his point would fail to acknowledge that there will likely be an attendance decrease when you go from being a Top 10 team to being a fringe Top 25/unranked team.

Yet you sit here and act like it's some kind of indictment of our fanbase because less fans came out to watch a team that... performed less?

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Others say that Turgeon turned off the fanbase. Well, Fran was not a like able guy at A&M and we still continued to have a robust football attendance.

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The people saying Turgon turned off the fanbase are the people that don't want to look in the mirror and acknowledge they really don't care about Aggie Sports as much as they claim they do. Acting like the coach insulted them personally makes it easier for them to not make the effort.

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For you to keep quoting annual figures and saying it tells the whole story is very naive and inaccurate.

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No, it's actually providing facts instead of anecdotal evidence from your memory a decade+ ago.

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And this debate originally started because somebody thought the crowd on Tuesday against Kentucky was great. I thought it was disappointing given the two big wins last week and everybody on the boards was excited about the team. Even in earlier years before BCG, fans would show up for Kansas and they packed the place for Texas and Bobby Knight. Then when A&M and Baylor had some heated battles, that game drew some decent crowds.

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2004 - SATURDAY home game vs Kansas - Attendance 8,122
2004 - OT game vs heated rival Baylor - Attendance 4,937


See why actually looking at the data rather than just going by what you remember and "have been paying attention to" shows us?

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So yeah it was disappointing to see 9,000 fans with 20% UK fans in the stands. Now you are saying 9,000 for UK should be considered a good number?

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We're an unranked team playing early Tuesday an hour away from a major metropolian area with no chance at the NCAA Tournament due to some pretty embarassing early season losses... in a state that has proven they really don't get that excited about college basketball.


Do I wish we had better attendance? Sure. Do I think our administration could be doing a better job marketing things? Sure. But the only people surprised by that number on Tuesday were people that refuse to actually acknowledge the landscape of college basketball interest in Texas.


We have entire threads devoted to people falling over themselves laughing at this:




... in a city with 10x the popuation... for a team that (based on ratings) has had a better season than we have...


Yet when you switch the topic to A&M attendance such obvious examples of how THE REGION JUST DOESN'T CARE THAT MUCH ABOUT COLLEGE BASKETBALL seems to completely escape them.

I'm not sure what side of this I'm even on now because I thought Tuesday's crowd was fine.

I think what it really comes down to is that guys like you/me/Hop and most of the posters on this forum see a decent squad fighting hard and big time Kentucky wildcats coming to town and we're excited and we assume there's a ton of people just like us, but there's really not.

Duke/UNC hoops drew 2.25 million viewers on a Saturday.

TX/OU football drew 7.25 million viewers on a Saturday.

Those people are in Houston, Dallas, and Austin and cant go to work and still get there for a 6pm tip off. In the Big 12 our weeknight time slots were only at 7pm or 8pm

If you're posting on a fan board, you are already an "above average super fan" type.

bobinator said:

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I don't really assume that at all, haha. That's why on Tuesday I was actually kind of surprised by the attendance, I thought it was pretty good, especially the students.

The only disappointing part to me is how many season ticket holders in prime locations sold their tickets. That's kind of annoying. Like, if you're not coming to the Kentucky game, then why are you buying season tickets?

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Points bribe???

But Tuesday is tough to make and back home for work from DFW...

I had season tickets from 2007-08 through 2011-12. The main reason I dropped basketball was because I had also started buying football in 2010 and then after that football and basketball just became too much in terms of cost.

This year was the first year I've considered going back to basketball (I dropped my football seats in 2018 after I got married.) LSU and Kentucky games on weeknights at 6pm was like the very first thing you see about the schedule when making that decision. I passed on season tickets and decided to start by only buying Gonzaga single game.

bobinator said:

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I don't really assume that at all, haha. That's why on Tuesday I was actually kind of surprised by the attendance, I thought it was pretty good, especially the students.

The only disappointing part to me is how many season ticket holders in prime locations sold their tickets. That's kind of annoying. Like, if you're not coming to the Kentucky game, then why are you buying season tickets?

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Hard for me to be too upset about that -- if those season ticket holders decide not to be season ticket holders then UK fans could have just bought the same tickets from the box office -- game wasn't close to a sellout and plenty of lower level seats available on gameday from 12th Man.

I don't mean just general lower level, I'm talking like first few rows.

I guess people just look at season tickets different than I do, but if I couldn't make a 6 PM weeknight game for a top ten opponent I'd just buy game-to-game or something.

It's not like it's a big deal, I'm just saying that's the only thing I was a little disappointed by.

We were happy to have him, too.

I enjoyed th lunches with players & coaches. Helped us get to know them. Has another coach
done this?