Todd Brommelkamp / 1600 ESPN
Plenty of seats remain for tonight’s Cy-Hawk men’s basketball game of Iowa versus Iowa State at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.
They may not be good seats, but seats remain nonetheless.
Declining attendance has been an issue for the men’s basketball program for years and there doesn’t appear to be an easy solution. If you can’t pack the arena for your conference opener against Northwestern or your biggest non-conference game of the year against the Cyclones, well, what are we even doing?
Ask a dozen Iowa fans why fans have stopped coming to Carver in bunches and you’ll likely get nearly a dozen different answers.
Is it the play of the team? The varying (and often inconvenient) start times? The cost? The lackluster gameday experience?
Maybe it’s all of the above and then some.
An abundance of weeknight games, coupled with early or late start times, are often the most cited culprit when discussing attendance for men’s games. (The women also play midweek games and their start times vary, but that’s an inconvenient truth best ignored here.)
Iowa can’t do much about either of those factors. Television contracts worth millions of dollars dictate when games tip off, and every team in America plays its share of games during the week now. That’s just the way life is in 2024 and beyond. Long gone are the days of playing Thursday and Saturday night and setting your schedules accordingly.
For the most part, Fran McCaffery’s teams have played winning basketball at home during his tenure. Conference title-winning teams haven’t been found on his watch, but you’d have to go back over four decades to find an Iowa men’s team that won an outright regular season league title.
Admittedly the game day experience at Carver-Hawkeye Arena isn’t the best, but efforts have been made to liven things up over the years. If you’re going to a basketball game expecting anything other than the game itself to serve as entertainment, that may be more of a “you” issue.
I’m inclined to think there’s a simple answer here. People have a lot going on in their lives, especially younger families with the type of discretionary income that lends itself to buying things like tickets to sporting events. There’s a lot more competition for today’s entertainment dollar than there was even two decades ago.
Will Iowa men’s basketball ever return to the point where attending a game is a priority for more than 7,000 to 8,000 diehards?
Probably not.
Wrestling fans and women’s basketball fans continue to fill the building, so it isn’t necessarily the arena itself that’s the problem.
There has to be an answer to Iowa’s attendance problem, but it’s hard to solve when no one knows what the starting equation is.
Todd Brommelkamp is the host of “The Todd Brommelkamp Show” and can be heard weekday mornings on 1600ESPN from 6:30 to 9 a.m.
