DePaul basketball has nowhere to go but up. The Blue Demons again finished in the cellar of the Big East this season, the seventh time in nine years that’s happened. As the team prepares to move into a new arena in Chicago’s South Loop next season, the program’s attendance is reaching record lows.
DePaul lost (a lot of attendance this season)
The Blue Demons weren’t getting much support in their final season at AllState Arena.
Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports
Ricky O'Donnell has covered basketball at all levels for more than a decade at SB Nation. He’s currently the Associate Director of Programming.
In their final year at Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Ill., DePaul’s attendance was down 20 percent from last season, according to Crain’s Business. The magazine reports seven of the team’s home games had fewer than 1,000 fans in the seats, while two games had fewer than 600 fans.
This is bad news for a program about to move into a new $164 million arena this fall. Crain’s has the numbers on how attendance will affect the city’s investment in a new arena:
The Blue Demons would have to draw more than five times their current average attendance at newly named Wintrust Arena on the McCormick Place campus to meet the lofty attendance projections laid out for the building by the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the agency known as McPier that operates the convention center.
A 2013 feasibility study prepared by Mineola, N.Y.-based hospitality consulting firm HVS and commissioned by McPier estimated that the venue would need to draw an average of 9,500 fans at 16 DePaul men’s basketball games to achieve its goal of breaking even on operating costs. The report suggested that DePaul games would account for more than 40 percent of the expected annual attendance of 370,000 across all events, including concerts, shows and conventions.
DePaul was once a proud program in the late ‘70s and ‘80s under head coach Ray Meyer and his son Joey. The Blue Demons reached the Final Four in 1979 behind star scorer Mark Aguirre, and went to the NCAA tournament 14 times over a 17-year period between 1976-1992.
DePaul is hoping a new arena in the city limits will boost fan interest. The Blue Demons enter the Big East tournament with just nine wins. This will be the second season in a row they’ve won single-digit games if they fail to get a victory there.
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