By Steve Rhodes
“DePaul’s debut basketball season in the South Loop has been rough – the team is currently at risk of finishing dead last in the Big East standings for the eighth time in the last decade. But tough competition, injuries and streaky offense aren’t the only ghosts to follow the Blue Demons to Wintrust Arena,” the DePaulia reports.
Since moving from a cavernous 17,000 seats at Allstate to a cozy 10,000 at Wintrust, DePaul’s men’s basketball team is still struggling to fill the stands, continuing to rely heavily upon ranked opponents and traveling fans to draw sizable crowds.
Through DePaul’s home game against Creighton on Feb. 7, the Blue Demons had drawn an average of 2,993 people to their games, including two that saw fewer than 1,000 people, according to attendance numbers obtained by The DePaulia through a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) from the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (commonly known as “McPier”), the quasi-governmental agency that partnered with the university to build and operate Wintrust.
Despite expectations that bringing the Blue Demons into the city would attract more fans to home games, attendance at Wintrust has seen just a modest uptick with only three games eclipsing half capacity (about 5,000), including Saturday’s game against Marquette. Last season at Allstate, DePaul saw some of the lowest attendance numbers in program history, averaging less than 2,000 in turnstile attendance.
In other words, the projections used in large part to justify building the Wintrust Arena – through the use of a TIF shell game – were as badly off as the so-called critics (in this case, sentient beings with bullshit detectors) predicted they would be. Let’s read on.
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Posted on February 27, 2018
