The world according to Jim:
• If you happened across any of the first couple of days of the Big West men’s and women’s basketball “championships” on ESPN+ – by edict of the conference office, it’s not considered merely a “tournament” any more – all of those empty seats might have caught your eye. Rows and rows and rows of them. …
• The Big West shifted its tournament to the Las Vegas area in 2021, to the arena at the Mandalay Bay resort, because pandemic restrictions made it more feasible to put the event in a bubble environment. The listed attendance for the championship game between UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine was 17, but the move wasn’t about attendance.
But Vegas has a subtle gravitational pull on the best of us. Since 2022, the tournament has been held at the Dollar Loan Center in Henderson, a 20-minute drive from the Strip and pretty much indicative of the Big West’s place in college basketball’s pecking order. It is one of five conference tournaments held in the Las Vegas area, and easily the least noticed. …
• Consider: Listed capacity at the Dollar Loan Center, home to the Vegas Golden Knights’ AHL franchise, is 5,567. The Big West hasn’t come close to filling it; crowds for the men’s championship games the last two seasons were 1,864 (Cal State Fullerton over Long Beach State in 2022) and 1,897 (UC Santa Barbara over Fullerton last year).
By way of comparison, Wednesday was the first day of four men’s conference tournaments in southern Nevada. The Pac-12 drew an announced 10,133 for its evening session at T-Mobile Arena, the Mountain West 5,858 at UNLV, the WAC 1,064 at the Orleans Arena – and the Big West 717 in Henderson. (The West Coast Conference finished its tournament Tuesday with an announced crowd figure of 5,794 on the final night, also at Orleans Arena.).
Thursday night’s Big West attendance, for CSUN against Hawaii and UC Riverside against Long Beach State: 1,227. …
• And here’s a…
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