USC MBB attendance lagging behind Dawn Staley’s Gamecocks. How big is the gap?
The contrast between South Carolina’s two basketball programs has been stark this season.
Let’s start with the on-court product. The USC women’s program, as has been the case for a decade, is one of the best in America. Under coach Dawn Staley, the No. 3 Gamecocks are 27-2 overall, have already secured the SEC title and will look to win their fourth national championship.
The antithesis of Staley’s squad has been the USC men’s team, which is almost guaranteed to miss the NCAA Tournament for the second-straight year. South Carolina’s men’s basketball team is 12-15 and 3-11 in conference play, bringing into question the job security of fourth-year head coach Lamont Paris.
One only needs to look at the crowd inside Colonial Life Arena to know which team is playing. And this weekend was a prime example.
The Gamecock men played Mississippi State on Saturday afternoon, announcing an attendance of 10,265. The actual number of fans inside Colonial Life to watch South Carolina pick up its first win in over a month was probably closer to half of the official figure.
Less than 24 hours later, after “ESPN College GameDay” spent the morning broadcasting live from the court, South Carolina’s women’s basketball team tipped off in front of a packed arena. The school announced a sellout crowd of 18,000 and, well, that number probably wasn’t far off. Soon after, USC cruised to a 37-point win, the Gamecocks’ main athletics’ X account posted a video touting the environment.
It is clear to anyone who’s followed both basketball teams this season that more fans are showing up to watch women’s games than the men. But how drastic is the disparity?
Through an open records request submitted just before New Year’s Day , The State asked for data showing the scanned ticket totals — a reflection of the number of fans who actually entered the arena — for all non-conference basketball games.
The South Carolina men’s team averaged 4,372 scanned tickets across its 10 non-conference games, records show. The average announced attendance for those same games was 10,739, a figure that reflects tickets sold or given away. And that number is almost identical to the average announced attendance for the Gamecocks’ seven SEC men’s home games (10,844).
Despite this list not including the most-attended Gamecock women’s games — matchups against SEC foes Ole Miss, Tennessee and Vanderbilt — Staley’s team averaged 7,448 scanned tickets in its eight home non-conference games.
The average announced attendance for those same eight women’s basketball home games (15,778) was about double the number of tickets scanned for each contest.
