College hoops attendance truly anemic now

"This is Ladell Andersen's office at BYU, calling for Brad Rock," said a voice on the phone that morning in the mid-1980s.

That wasn't a good sign.

It's seldom good news when the coach is calling a reporter, instead of the other way around.

"Hold, please," she said curtly.

Momentarily, the BYU basketball coach came on the line.

"I want to know why you used the word 'anemic' in your story yesterday," he said hotly.

He went on to say he particularly objected to my using it in the first paragraph. I had referenced the crowds the Cougars were drawing that year. Attendance was around 18,000 at the most recent game.

"We're in the top 10 in the country in attendance and you're calling it anemic," said Andersen. "How can you call that anemic?"

I pointed out there were still 5,000 empty seats, and it hadn't been all that long ago that every seat was sold to every game.

In hindsight, I think he was right; it really was a nice crowd. A great crowd compared to now.

BYU is 19-1, yet still only averaging 12,000 fans a game this season.

But it's not just the Cougars. In fact, they're near the top of the Mountain West Conference in attendance, about a thousand per game behind New Mexico and UNLV. Look around. Utah is averaging only 8,565. Weber (4,854) and SUU (2,270) can't draw mosquitoes. Only Utah State continues to look good (9,554 in the 10,270-seat Spectrum), thanks to its rabid, rowdy student section.

It's not just the Mountain West that's having troubles. On TV highlights, Thursday's USU game at Fresno looked like someone had called "Fire!"

The place was a prairie.

Watch almost any team that isn't in the Top 25 — and some that are — and you'll find empty seats, and plenty of them.

There are many reasons why fans are staying away from college basketball games by the thousands nowadays: traffic, the economy, competing entertainment, too much defense and not enough scoring. I'm convinced the biggest culprits, though, are television (saturation and scheduling) and the NBA, which have combined to make college hoops an I'll-watch-it-if-I-get-around-to-it event.