Attendance at MCI

[OldHoyafan]

If I am not mistaken, the last two home games have attendance marks of over 12,000. Can anyone verify that attendance has increased almost twofold from last year?

[TrueHoyaBlue]

I think the official number on the ND game was something like 9,300, but it does seem like the excitement is slowly creeping back into the MCI Center.

[Fan Of The Game]

I think we'll have to wait until later in the season to quantify the any attendence increase. The Notre Dame attendence was higher than say, the St. John's game from a similar date a year ago, but we expect the ND game to have high attendence...two years ago we sold something like 18,000 seats to the GU/ND game.

[TrueHoyaBlue]

Attendance over the last six seasons has averaged between 7,758 (99-00) and 8,796 (02-03).

Last year's average was 8,431
Not counting the Duke game (which was a 20,000+ attendance game), the average drops to 7,646 (which is actually the lowest average of the Cap Centre/MCI Center era). If you were to drop the Duke game to 12,000 (this year's capacity), the figure is 7,924.

This year, with 5 home games to go, the average sits at 7,912. It's too early to tell whether this is a major improvement, but the next five games at MCI will speak a lot to the Hoyas ability to draw a crowd.

[ShimmyJr]

would love to see some of the national buzz translate into increased attendance, even from fairweather GU fans...a packed house cheering for good basketball first, and GU success second, is better than an empty arena where you can hear JTII screaming to his players