The eighth-richest man in the world could have been anywhere on the night of Jan. 2, 2024, but on this particular evening, he just happened to be in Waco, Texas.
Wearing a gray quarter-zip emblazoned with the school’s interlocking ‘BU’ logo, Bill Gates sat directly behind the Baylor bench for the Bears’ 98-79 victory against Cornell.
Why the Seattle businessman was there, of all places, wasn’t some elaborate mystery. Gates is dating philanthropist Paula Hurd, a member of Baylor’s board of regents who donated $7 million to have the Bears’ court named after her and her late husband, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, as part of a sparkling new arena, Foster Pavilion, that was hosting its first-ever game that night.
For those who closely follow college basketball, though, there was something even more notable about the occasion than the Microsoft co-founder being in attendance.
For as lavish as the Bears’ new home gym is – and with a $212 million price tag, it’s quite luxurious – it’s actually smaller than the venue it’s replacing by a pretty substantial margin. While the since-departed Ferrell Center, which opened in 1988, housed 10,284, Foster Pavilion seats just 7,500, a decrease of 27.1%.
Baylor is hardly alone in doing so, either.
Nearly 100 miles exactly to its south, and also hugging up against Interstate 35, is the Moody Center, a 21-month-old, $375 million facility that houses the conference rival (for now) men’s and women’s basketball programs at the University of Texas. The Longhorns, too, downsized, going with a venue that can fit as few as 10,763 people after spending the previous 45 years at the since-demolished Frank Erwin Center, which held 16,540 fans for basketball games in its final decade of existence. That move came with an even more dramatic capacity drop than Baylor’s, one of 34.9%.
For all of the state’s eccentricities, this isn’t a uniquely Texas phenomenon. Across college basketball, a number of schools are (or already have) come to a sobering realization, particularly in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic – their arenas are too big.
For much of the modern history of Division I men’s college basketball, schools investing in larger home gyms made sense.
More seats meant more ticket revenue. Assuming the team was reasonably good and the fan base was relatively engaged, it offered a better, more imposing home-court atmosphere. It became a point of pride, too, that a school boasted such an enormous venue, something that also typically played well when trying to woo recruits.
(Think of Ray Allen’s visit to the fictional Tech U in ‘He Got Game’ – the part of it where he was touring the arena, not when he was having a three-way with a couple of real-life porn stars)
New projects in the sport’s six biggest conferences – the ACC, Big Ten, Big East, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC – reflected that. From 1993 through 2016, 19 schools from those leagues opened new arenas. All but three of them were larger than the buildings they were leaving and, upon closer examination, two of those three exceptions don’t really count, as Miami and USC were moving from off-campus arenas formerly used by NBA teams to on-campus venues.
There was an inherent problem with this trend, though. For about a 10-year stretch from the late 2000s until the late 2010s, new gyms were getting bigger, but fewer people were showing up nationally for college basketball games. That dip affected not only the most nascent arenas, but ones that had been constructed over the previous decades with the belief and statistical evidence that a building that size could consistently attract a crowd big enough to fill it, or at least come close.
About 15 years ago, that stopped being the case.
Over an 11-year stretch, from the 2007-08 season until the 2018-19 season, the average audience for a Division I men’s basketball game fell by 13.7%. Sports viewing and consumption habits had changed, whether it was for students or the general public in towns and cities throughout the country (it’s not just those damn zoomers and their smartphones). There was still an appeal of physically being at a game, especially for some of the sport’s preeminent powers, but increasingly, watching the game from the comfort of your own couch became more accessible and fiscally prudent.
Whatever attendance plunge college basketball had been enduring was exacerbated by the pandemic. Schools across the country placed a hard limit on the number of fans inside the building during the 2020-21 season, with some even banning spectators outright. On the whole, they were slow to return, as the average attendance in 2021-22 was 4,204, the lowest it had been since NCAA began tracking Division I-wide attendance for 1992-93 season. It rebounded a bit the following season, up to 4,354, but even that’s still down 18.2% from what it was 15 years earlier.
Those figures have turned some of the sport’s largest arenas into structural anachronisms. Buildings that were once central to the program’s marketing and overall identity effectively became funeral homes, mausoleums or whatever other death-related edifice suits your liking.
Of the 15 largest arenas in Division I, only three have gotten to at least 90% of their capacity on average over the past two full post-pandemic seasons. Ten of those 15 venues couldn’t even get to 80% while eight failed to crack 70%.
Among the dozens, if not hundreds, of existential questions institutions of higher learning have faced since March 2020 is how to get fans back to games or how to mitigate what appears to be a larger shift that’s impacting sports well beyond men’s college basketball.
For some colleges and universities, their big idea was actually something quite small.
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