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Originally Posted by Blue Side Up  there is a lot of opinions on the D-I move. it is pretty cool, but i don't really know if it is going to work that well. i don't know if we have the student population or the population in the surrounding area to support D-I athletics. do you know what the smallest D-I school is? it would be interesting to see what their student population/area population is. |
I'm not sure about who exactly is the smallest or has the smallest fanbases to draw from in D-I. There are all kinds of private schools with enrollments under 10,000, but for whatever reasons draw large numbers of fans. The schools I like to think of like that would be places like Duke, Bradley, Creighton, etc. Those are all pretty big basketball schools. For football I can't really think of too many schools below 10,000 students that have strong programs (besides maybe Wake Forest), but some of the big time D-I schools like Notre Dame, Miami, and Boston College have relatively smaller number of students.
Southern Illinois, for example, statistically (I don't have the numbers) has the smallest population base in our basketball conference. The town itself has about 35,000 when you count the students. Our total enrollment is at 21,000, and for basketball we usually draw anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 students every game. We average around 7,000 total fans every game, which I believe is 4th in our conference.
The whole attendance issue is kind of big down here, because a lot of people debate that we should be selling out (about 9,900 fans) EVERY night with our improved quality of play in basketball over the last five years, but it is a really complex issue, and the things I bring up only scratch the surface. For football, it's even worse. We usually peak at around 13,000 fans for two games during the middle of the season, and it slowly declines to around 7 or 8,000 for the last few games of the year. Some people debate the weather being an issue, our location, large amount of other outdoor activities in the area, high school sports being such a huge deal here, and the list just never ends.
I kind of veered off on answering your question, but it's kind of a complex one, and I thought my school would be a great example for that, because we have so many factors for our attendance figures. It is crazy.