At some level, John Calipari has to know that bigger crowds are around the corner.
Once the SEC season starts, his Arkansas basketball team will no doubt start playing in front of capacity or near-capacity crowds in its 19,200-seat Bud Walton Arena.
Still, given how much hype there has been around this team and how packed the arena is sure to be come January, he is somewhat surprised that the arena has been around half full for his first games as Head Hog. Especially since the entire season had been sold out well before it tipped off.
The latest reminder of that was on Monday night, when Arkansas defeated Pacific by 19 points in front of a spirited by spare crowd. Afterward, in light of the relatively light crowds that had previously shown up vs Lipscomb and Troy, Calipari made a plea to fans on a live radio interview with Razorback announcer Chuck Barrett.
“If you have tickets and you’re not going to use them, I guess you could go online and give them back to the university,” Calipari said. “They’ll give them away. Or even better yet, give them to your neighbor. ‘Here, do you want to go to an Arkansas game?’ … Don’t sit on tickets. Either give them away or we’ll give them away, because this environment is so good.”
As to why folks are not showing up, there may be something going on here more than just the normal issue of midweek games in November and December getting smaller crowds than weekend and conference games.
Chuck Barrett Calls Out Some Fans
Chuck Barrett said that he feels there’s been a culture shift in recent years where college sports fans with season tickets are less likely to simply give away the unused tickets for free to friends and family, and instead are trying to essentially turn reselling those tickets on third-party platforms into a side hustle.
But they are often failing to make make much off the effort, and the ticket goes to waste.
He points to the upcoming Arkansas vs Louisiana Tech football game as Exhibit A: “I’ve already seen ads for the Louisiana Tech game on social media trying to sell tickets $75, $100 a pop, with a parking pass thrown in,” he said on Tuesday’s “Chuck and Bo Show.”
“Are you kidding me? Do you really think somebody’s going to pay you a hundred dollars right now on Monday or Tuesday for a ticket that on Friday or Saturday they might pick up for 20 bucks max? If you really think somebody’s going to do that, go ahead and use your brain.”
Barrett wants such fans to put aside that “hopeful greed” of an easy buck and instead just give away their tickets to people they know will use them. In the end, all parties will feel better.
“Too many people want to recoup the money that they’ve already spent. They’re just dumb because they think they’re going to be able to pull it off and then Thursday or Friday rolls around, nobody’s bitten and so they end up not doing anything.”
Arkansas Basketball Does Have a Plan
While the simple solution would be to get Arkansas basketball fans themselves to more generously give away their unused tickets, that is a responsibility many won’t fulfill – as evidenced by Monday night’s abysmal showing.
This is something the guys at Inside Arkansas pointed out last week, following the Troy game and before an even smaller crowd for the Pacific game.
“These people just sit on their hands and they get lazy,” host John Nabors said. “They get busy. We all do. I mean, we got work and all that. So it’s like people just don’t know how to do it or want to do it, and it’s frustrating.”
To the UA’s credit, they do have a HogTix transfer program in which the tickets can be donated back to the school and then redistributed to “a deserving community or campus group.” Fans can also sell their tickets on SeatGeek, the official resell marketplace of the Razorbacks, directly from their Razorback Ticket Center account.
However, even with those things in place, Arkansas marketed single-game tickets the day of the Pacific game. Upper deck tickets were $20 and lower bowl tickets were $60, with each ticket also having a $5 fee.
Too Little Familiarity?
Some self-professed casual Arkansas basketball fans have said they feel less close to this team compared to the teams under Eric Musselman. It’s possible that there’s a correlation between the smaller crowds and having no native Arkansan in the rotation for likely the first time in program history.
Such a correlation, to be clear, has nothing to do whether guys like Zvonimir “Big Z” Ivisic, Boogie Fland and Adou Thiero are likeable or not. They are, and each has his own unique story.
Instead, this has everything to do with common sense. In previous years, Arkansas natives like Joseph Pinion, Devo Davis, Jaylin Williams and Layden Blocker would have had friends and family coming to most if not all home games. Each of those guys was known to locals before arriving on campus simply playing high school basketball in Arkansas. That familiarity would naturally boost attendance numbers.
Calipari may be seeing one effect of having elite talent who hail from almost all corners of the nation (and globe in Ivisic’s case), but not even enough local talent familiar to the casual fan who isn’t consuming 30-minute long Hogs+ interviews.
That, too, will change going forward. The current players will only become more well-known to Hog fans over the course of the season and those staying for Year 2 under Calipari will add a sense of continuity currently lacking outside of Trevon Brazile and Lawson Blake, both of whom are recovering from injuries.
Importantly, Calipari just signed a local high school basketball star in Springdale native Isaiah Sealy.
What Can the UA Do?
The UA will never make a quota regarding in-state players, but it could consider an idea or two from the public on how to pack more arenas. During last week’s show, Nabors proposed giving the UA’s non-resold tickets away for free. After all, the UA has already sold them once and they’d stand to make more money with people actually in the building.
“If you give them free tickets, they’re going to go, and guess what, U of A?” Nabors said. “Odds are, they’re going to spend some money on the concession stands that the margin on them (is) just through the roof, 4800% or whatever it is. So you’ll still make some money if you give away tickets.”
Nabors’ other idea doesn’t really increase the attendance, but could help the atmosphere at Bud Walton Arena. He suggested taking a page out of Florida’s unofficial playbook and having ushers who allow fans in the upper deck to fill in the lower bowl at a certain point during the first half or early in the second half.
It would be similar, as co-host Curtis Wilkerson pointed out, to some past Arkansas basketball games when snow and ice in the area impacted travel. People were just encouraged to show up and could essentially sit wherever they wanted.
“They would almost block off the upper portion and you’d still wind up having a hell of an atmosphere for those games,” Wilkerson said. “It was so intimate. It was just right on top of the action. Do that when you have these situations.”
Not only does that make things tougher on the opposing team, but it’s also much more aesthetically pleasing for those watching on television.
A glimpse at what was expected from Bud Walton heading into the 2024-25 season:
How Does Buying Season Tickets Work, Anyway?
The reason this is such a big topic right now is because the Razorbacks, for a fourth consecutive season, sold out of their season tickets. That means all tickets for every game are accounted for.
It’s worth noting, though, that buying season tickets requires fans to put a little skin in the game, as they not only have to purchase the tickets themselves, but they must also make a donation to the Razorback Foundation to get the rights to buy them.
At that point, the tickets are in the hands of the fans to do whatever they please – use them, sell them on a third-party website, give them away or utilize the HogTix transfer program laid out earlier.
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Watch the full discussion from Inside Arkansas here:
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Andrew Hutchinson contributed to the above
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