College hockey's popularity in this area

Yesterday's Herald feature centered around UND's home success. The Sioux are unbeaten in their last 16 in The Ralph and have lost just four of their last 36 games there. They haven't been swept at home in 35 months -- the longest stretch in the WCHA.

The fans have followed. It may seem surprising, but UND hockey outdraws several historic and prominent college basketball programs. That list includes UCLA (which owns an NCAA record 11 national titles and has been to the Final Four in two of the last three years), Florida (which has won two of the last four national championships), Michigan, Missouri, Villanova (Final Four team last year), Duke (which gets an asterisk because its arena is smaller than REA) and many others.

This type of support extends to the WCHA and is evident at the WCHA Final Five. Here is another piece of trivia that did not make it into the story: The WCHA Final Five outdraws the Big 10, Big 12, SEC and Pac-10 conference basketball tournaments.

And this is using attendance figures from last season, when Minnesota was knocked out in the quarterfinals and neither St. Cloud State or Mankato (the other two closest-in-location programs) made the Final Five. It was one of the weaker attended Final Fives -- if not the weakest attended Final Five -- since I've started covering the team. And it still outdrew most of the major conference hoops tournaments.

Of the 31 Division-I college basketball conferences, only the ACC and Big East (barely) have better attendance at their conference tournaments than the WCHA.

The basketball tournaments should have an advantage being that they usually have two games per session, allowing fans from four teams to filter in for the games, whereas the WCHA only does one game per session.

More proof of hockey's popularity in this area comes from last March, when the NCAA basketball tournament was in the Twin Cities at the same time as the WCHA Final Five. The first-round hoops matchup showcased NDSU, playing in arguably the program's biggest game in history, against defending national champ Kansas, which was led by a local Bloomington product. That game (coupled with the attendance from the game after it) drew 12,814. That night, the UND and Minnesota-Duluth hockey game drew 17,729.

College hockey's popularity might not be as vast in the southern areas of the country, but its popularity in the upper Midwest can't be ignored.

Posted by: Schlossman on Friday, November 13 at 2:33 AM | Comments (12) | Permalink