In talking to the average Arkansas fan these days, if you didn’t know better, you might think the athletic department is in dire straits.
In fact, having watched the Hogs for about 50 years at this point, I can’t recall a season when less enthusiasm has existed for a bowl-eligible team whose fanbase has rushed the field this season and still have a game to improve its prospects for when and where they play in the postseason.
For sure, this team has seen its highs and lows, although the highs don’t seem to be enough for the football Hogs even though they’ve beat Vegas’ over/under win total and have outperformed most expectations from even the most naïve homers.
Meanwhile, the basketball team, which includes more than a couple of future first-round draft picks, isn’t packing the Bud at the level expected considering all games were sold out months ago. At this point in the season, the basketball Hogs may be drawing fewer ticket holders into Bud Walton arena than Eric Musselman did in previous Novembers, but such numbers are not publicly available.
This is despite having what appears to easily be the most talented group of individuals the Hogs have had in years. Arkansas is 5-1, ranked No. 19 and coming off an utter obliteration of something called UMES. It has lost only to No. 17 Baylor.
Arkansas Basketball Attendance Theories
There are a hundred theories about why the attendance for these games are lower than expected — sometimes not even half full, based on eyeball estimates. None, thankfully, are as complex as those surrounding Big Foot or the pyramid-building aliens.
It may be as simple as fans believing this team is so talented that games in Bud Walton at this point are foregone conclusions in the “W” side of the ledger, and therefore are just waiting for a game against a good opponent that matters.
So far, the most heavily-attended game was the Kansas game where Arkansas played a really good opponent in a game that doesn’t count.
Or, it may be as simple as subpar scheduling of pay-to-play, pad-your-resume games against directional schools. With bad timing, too. Last Monday’s Pacific game could not have come at a worse time, considering the football side had gone to war in Fayetteville with its top historic rival just 48 hours before.
Arkansas basketball coach John Calipari used the cavernous turnout as an opportunity to call out fans who are sitting on their season tickets:
This Monday night’s game was slightly better attended, and those fans saw first-hand how frighteningly potent these Razorbacks are when they finally start shooting well from the outside. The result was a 109-35 wipe-out of Maryland-Eastern Shore.
Afterward, Arkansas basketball assistant Chin Coleman said the score “got a little bit out of hand,” which is kind of like saying the 7-foot-2 Zvonimir Ivisic is “a little tall.”
Even the most ardent Hog fan who bleeds Cardinal red and wears a Todd Day jersey can’t be expected to go to every event. So, if fans are going to burn that chit with whomever they can burn it with, they’re going to save it for later when it counts more.
But there’s little question that something of a mini-malaise has settled in over the basketball program even if some of that is due to high attendance in football.
The Issue of Scalping
First of all, scalping is not new in sports. We all know that. As long ago as 2010, Kansas got dinged for coaches scalping tickets, but it goes well further back than that, possibly just a couple of million years after the world’s oldest profession became a profit center.
One thought is to eliminate the obvious scalpers from the secondary market to ensure tickets end up with fans who actually intend to use them. That would involve identifying who has bought season tickets with the sole intention of turning a profit rather than counting turnovers. These are people who have no connection to the Hogs other than as a profit center. They buy up blocks of tickets and re-sell them at a profit.
To some extent, that is what’s happening today. Best of Arkansas Sports’ Andrew Hutchinson has confirmed there are multiple seats where the tickets to all nine of Arkansas’ SEC games are already listed on SeatGeek, the official re-sell marketplace of the Razorbacks.
Of course, this would require creating some kind of system that’s immune to unauthorized re-selling. But if real season ticket-holders had a mechanism to return tickets for someone else’s use, and it was well-known how to use it, more butts would wind up in more seats. And to Arkansas’ credit, it has created a HogTix transfer program that helps facilitate that.
To be certain, this is not just a Razorback problem. NFL teams like the Denver Broncos have even put in policies to combat it, but they aren’t perfect. About a year ago, Vanderbilt instituted a threshold for how many times in a season a fan can miss games without losing their tickets. And anybody who randomly follows the Philippine Basketball Association knows what kind of issue scalping can be in such a competitive landscape – check this list of the new sites in Philippines for proof.
There’s no easy solution to this problem, but Vanderbilt’s is intriguing. On the one hand, wealthy season ticket holders may be too bothered to deal with any of this. They just want to be able to go when they want to go. They have money to buy the tickets and whether they use them or not is their business and their business alone.
On the other hand, these season ticket holders give money so the program can get better, which is measured by wins. Theoretically, when one more fan gets to go to a game, one more voice is added to the crowd and it all leads to wins.
Potential Solutions at Bud Walton Arena
Scalping has been going on for years and it’s never been a good thing. What would be good is to devise some system that ensures as many people as possible are inside Bud Walton every single game.
Taking into account some of the above, here are a few ideas toward how such a system could work, as proposed by a friend of BoAS:
- Create a contest or ticket priority for season ticket holders to have the highest percentage tickets scanned, not just purchased.
- Winners get exclusivity, discounts, recognition, etc., and would need to be done within the donation tiers to reward those who donate the most. Can’t “punish” those who donate large amounts as much.
- Season ticket holders would be more likely to either give single-game tickets back to the university or sell on a secondary site (if allowed) to increase their attendance percentage.
- All tickets/seats not scanned by halftime need to be made available to be claimed within an app so that people could move closer or gain access for free (this takes a page out of what Florida allows)
These are just some ideas to move us closer to a solution.
The key here isn’t just to make sure folks get into the arena to add their voices to the home crowd. It’s making sure to apply their mouths to all the hot dogs, nachos, Cokes and more that are sold at extreme markups from the concession stand.
Arkansas is losing out on a nice chunk of recurring change when there are so many empty seats at Bud Walton Arena, especially in a season that has as much excitement around it as this one.
WIth guys like John Tyson supporting the program, it can afford an awful lot when it comes to coaching salaries and NIL packages.
But one thing it can’t afford is to leave so much on the table.
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Arkansas vs Illinois
Next up for Arkansas is the first game in the toughest non-conference stretch of the season for Arkansas. The tilt in Kansas City is followed by an away game against Miami in the SEC/ACC Challenge and another neutral site game against Michigan in Madison Square Garden sandwiched around a home game against UTSA.
Illinois is now 5-1 on the season with their lone loss coming to the only SEC opponent it’s faced in Alabama. The Illini lost that matchup 100-87 on a neutral court, though it shouldn’t be indicative of how good or bad they are given Alabama’s high expectations and talent level for this season.
The Illini shoot the ball from long range at an extremely high volume. They average 34.3 attempts, ranking No. 4 in the country, while also making 11.3 three-pointers per game. Their percentage, however, sits at only 33%, just around No. 200 in the nation.
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