Saturday, during the DU-Boston U game at the Xcel Energy Center
NOTE: I’ll update this once the championship game starts and I have a photo and a sense of the size of the crowd today.
ST. PAUL, Minn — At the NCAA West Regional Saturday, when Ferris State beat St. Cloud State in overtime and Denver routed Boston University, attendance for the single-ticket semifinal doubleheader was announced as 4,926.
But as you can see from the above, there weren’t nearly that “many” around during the second game to see the Pioneers romp. The vast majority of even that small official figure was St. Cloud State fans, who — if they came in from the school’s home city — traveled about 75 miles and left after the first game.
With the Huskies out, and the championship game as of this typing coming up in a little over an hour, I’m assuming the number of fans actually in the seats (regardless of pre-sale) again will be embarrassingly low.
I’ve made it a practice to never try to tell anyone how to spend their entertainment dollars, so this is not an indignant rant about how these teams deserve better and the public has let them down, whether that’s taken to mean the Twin Cities hockey constituency or anyone else.
For a short-notice trip, it would have been a 900-mile drive from Denver or an airline ticket, and about a 650-mile trip from Big Rapids, Michigan — the home of Ferris State. (No, me neither … until yesterday.)
But this fueling the argument that the four separate four-team regionals should be held at campus arenas, at the homes of the No. 1 seeds in each region. Or even that both of the first round and quarterfinals should be played at the home of the higher seed, before feeding into the Frozen Four.
It’s “unfair,” but it makes both economic and, well, artistic sense. It just doesn’t feel right to see games with so much on the line played in front of a crowd that, if you didn’t know better, was settling in 15 minutes before the warmup. Yes, in this case, four-team regionals would have been at St. Cloud State, Quninnipiac (Hamden, Conn.), Providence, and North Dakota (Grand Forks).
Saturday, I asked several Pioneers and DU coach Jim Montgomery if it was hard to play such a big game in front of such a small crowd. The players’ answers were pretty much the same as their coach’s, so I’ll let Montgomery speak for them.
“You know what, no,” he said. “Would you like to have a packed house? Yes. But really when you’re dialed in, your’re focused and you’re committed to each other and there’s an NCAA championship you’re playing for. It doesn’t matter, you could be playing in Siberia.”
Terry Frei: tfrei@denverpost,com or
