One of the pressing questions this year as America’s mass-spectator sports moved out of 2020’s pandemic-inspired attendance restrictions is whether the crowds were going to come back en masse to the ballgames?
Locally, University of Kentucky football fans have answered with an emphatic yes.
In the 61,000-seat Kroger Field, UK sold out three of its four home Southeastern Conference games this fall — Florida (announced attendance of 61,632), LSU (61,690), Tennessee (61,690) — and just missed on its fourth vs. Missouri (58,537).
Going into Saturday’s regular-season finale vs. New Mexico State, every one of the Wildcats’ prior six home games but the opener against Louisiana Monroe (47,693) has drawn in excess of 55,000 fans.
“It’s been an amazing year as far as (fan) presence in packing the stadium,” UK Coach Mark Stoops said Monday during his weekly news conference.
The success of Kentucky football at the turnstiles has been the exception to the post-pandemic rule in American sports, however.
The headline last week on a Jacob Feldman article on the sports business Website Sportico.com, was, “Attendance is down across sports.” As compared to 2019-20, Feldman cited significant increases in the numbers of NFL, NBA and NHL teams this season playing before less than 90-percent capacity.
While the sample size is small, attendance has so far this season been soft for UK basketball games in Rupp Arena at Central Bank Center.
For the Wildcats’ 2021-22 exhibition opener against Kentucky Wesleyan, the announced attendance in Rupp — the number of tickets distributed to the event — was 17,133 in the 20,545-seat venue.
The figure for the second exhibition, against Miles College, was 17,814.
With Robert Morris as the foe for the official home opener Friday night, the announced crowd figure was 18,454.
Look, a multitude of sports teams — college and professional — would salivate over attendance numbers such as these.
But the historic standard for Kentucky men’s basketball attendance is different. For decades after Rupp Arena opened in 1976, if the Wildcats were playing, the stands were packed.
That has ceased being the reality.
Just two years ago, the last season that tipped off before the coronavirus reached North America, Kentucky’s announced crowds for exhibitions with Georgetown College (19,527), Kentucky State (19,588) and its regular-season home opener with Eastern Kentucky (20,163) were more robust than we’ve seen this year.
That was also true in 2018-19, when the announced crowds for the equivalent games were Transylvania (19,927), Indiana University of Pennsylvania (20,095) and Southern Illinois (20,277).
From observation, the season-ticket-holding fans who attend games in Rupp Arena tend to skew a touch older.
So it is possible there are “at-risk” Kentucky fans still not comfortable attending indoor sporting events in what remains of the pandemic.
We are not going to be able to fully gauge the attitudes of Kentucky basketball backers toward being back inside Rupp Arena as part of unrestricted crowds in the current stage of the COVID-19 pandemic until UK faces a marquee foe at home.
That won’t happen until John Calipari’s Wildcats battle intrastate archrival Louisville on Dec. 22.
Nevertheless, judging from what I read in my email box and on social media sites, a growing segment of the UK fan base seems to have reached a tipping point in its attitudes toward the quality of opponents that fill the Wildcats’ non-league, home schedule each November.
The relatively large number of empty seats in the lower arena — where the season-ticket holders reign — at UK-Robert Morris last week was jarring.
Remaining non-league home games that begin Tuesday night with Mount St. Mary’s and also include Ohio University (Nov. 19), Albany (Nov. 22), North Florida (Nov. 26), Central Michigan (Nov. 29) and Southern University (Dec. 7) seem unlikely to fully turn the fan-apathy tide.
In fairness, Rupp Arena has absolutely been teeming with fans this year compared to what has gone on across I-64 to the west.
Playing in the 22,090-seat KFC Yum Center, the Louisville Cardinals through four home dates have drawn announced crowds of 13,023 and 12,477 for exhibitions vs. Kentucky State and West Georgia, respectively, followed by 12,643 and 12,431 for regular-season contests against Southern and Furman.
It seems a fairly sizable part of a Cardinals fan base that has become divided and demoralized after a half-decade of seemingly non-ending turmoil and scandal has checked out.
Louisville does not play what I would characterize as a gold-star opponent at home until Duke visits on Jan. 29.
It will be fascinating to see if the Yum Center will even sell out for the final Mike Krzyzewski coaching appearance in the commonwealth.
Here in Lexington, I expect Rupp to be full for the big games.
While the pandemic’s impact on indoor sports attendance cannot be fully discounted, my sense is the empty seats in Rupp Arena so far in this early-season are more a case of the ticket-buying public trying again to send the university a message about the quality of foes they are watching in relation to the amount of money they are spending to watch.