I'll start out with the obvious fact that I'm new to UAB. This past year was my first full year caring and following the program on a weekly basis. I've liked them since they beat Iowa State in the tournament, and thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere at the Auburn @ UAB game. Fast forward to this season, and I decided to go to a couple of games for fun, but really fell in love with the history of the program...not to mention how much easier it is to get to basketball games at Bartow than Auburn arena. I started off buying tickets to Memphis and La Tech and ended up picking up way more as the season went on. Now I've got good seats for this season and am incredibly anxious for the season to start.
Being a new fan, I wanted to familiarize myself with the program and see if there might be something I could do to help the department improve its attendance. So what I ended up doing was compiling the yearly attendance data and compared that against UAB's KenPom rank, UAB's opponent's KenPom rank, and whether or not they had made the tournament the previous season. Here's a picture of the results, as well as the forecasted results through 2023.
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Here's a link to my regression table, showing a decent correlation, if you're into that sort of thing.
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As you can see, UAB's own KenPom rating has dipped quite a bit since 2012, and the Opponent's KenPom has drastically dropped. I believe that this correlates to the lower attendance we've seen in recent seasons than than the first decade I looked at. I know that a lot of this stems from the league reshuffling, and losing a lot of big names, but I think UAB needs to figure out a way to get better teams to come (or, more importantly, figure out how to get P5 programs to come here).
I then did this analysis on a game by game level from 2012 to 2018, but I won't go into that here since it's big and boring. The main results from this were that brand name basketball programs (i.e. Memphis), and "Power 5" programs (i.e. Auburn) are what really get butts into Bartow. I know you're all against it, but I personally think UAB could figure out a way to navigate 2-for-1 deals against 6 P5/Brand Name programs to ensure 2 huge teams each season, and also 4 game at a big name opponent. At a minimum, I think this method would bring in an extra $70k-100k in ticket revenue each year, and give UAB great RPI exposure.