Did A Losing Record Affect Marquette’s Attendance?

On Monday morning, I made a trip to the grocery store, and as usual, I had my earbuds in the whole time to get some podcast listening done. FUN FACT: The combination of March Madness viewing and Assorted Life Items has put me VERY BEHIND on my podcast listening. That’s why I was listening to an episode of Phantom Island from April 15th on June 1st. Stop judging me!

In any case, on that episode of Phantom Island, Ryan Nanni sat down with David Covucci from FOIAball to talk about the claimed attendance numbers at college football games. At some point in their conversation — and really, it wasn’t a specific thing that either one said, just the tenor of the discussion — I suddenly had the idea for this blog post.

We all remember that Marquette men’s basketball went 12-20 during the 2025-26 season, and generally speaking, we all didn’t like it. Thus, the question: How much did “Everyone disliked that” affect Marquette’s attendance and/or ticket sales?

I can tell you for a fact that Marquette’s crummy record had an impact on me attending two games, even though I’m a season ticket holder. Weirdly, both were Marquette home wins. I missed the home Xavier win because 1) team bad, 2) weather awful with sub-zero temperatures, 3) my son had final exams for high school that week. I missed the home Creighton win because 1) team bad, 2) 8:30pm start, and 3) 4:30am wakeup call for Reasons. In addition to me skipping out on those games, I put them up for resale through the Marquette/Ticketmaster portal for not much more than face value as a season ticket price, and neither of them were snapped up in the couple of days I had them listed. That’s at least anecdotal evidence that 1) even die-hard Marquette fans struggled to drum up the interest in attending games and 2) there wasn’t much interest in what we’ll broadly call “walk-up” or “day-of” ticket sales.

In general, it might be hard to quantify a big picture impact of record on ticket sales/attendance. However, there is a unique circumstance to how things went for the Golden Eagles relative to attendance at games at Fiserv Forum. Two circumstances, actually: 1) Marquette plays the same 10 home games against the same 10 Big East opponents every year and 2) Marquette was 5-6 on the year and essentially dead in the water for the NCAA tournament by the time they played a single home Big East game this past season. If you want to mix in a little bit extra: Marquette was 0-4 in the Big East heading into their third conference home game, and whatever little prayer of “well, maybe they’ll turn it around?” was completely gone.

And so, I think comparing each home game’s attendance to attendance against that opponent the year before has the possibility to tell us something about how things went for Marquette as the season went along. I’ll go in order of home games played to try to create a better context for this, and I’ll provide info relative to the games (Tuesday night vs Saturday afternoon, and so on) where appropriate.

Keep in mind: I don’t know for sure, but I presume that all of these numbers are Tickets Sold, not Tickets Scanned. That means we’re probably only getting a good read on the impact of the record on ticket sales as opposed to whether or not there were a lot of empty but sold seats because people, probably mostly season ticket holders like me, just said “meh” and moved on for a particular game. REMEMBER: Some chunk of Marquette’s season ticket sales are to corporate accounts where they just pass the tickets around the office!

Okay, here we go.

Georgetown

Record: 5-6
2026: 14,038
2025: 15,756
Change: -1,718 (-10.9%)

Context: 2026 December Wednesday night vs 2025 January Tuesday night

Seton Hall

Record: 5-8, 0-2 Big East
2026: 15,028
2025: 14,948
Change: +80 (+0.5%)

Context: 2026 December Tuesday night vs 2025 February Tuesday night, 2026 game was New Year’s Eve Eve, 2025 game had Jim Chones jersey honors

Xavier

Record: 5-10, 0-4 Big East
2026: 14,020
2025: 17,881
Change: -3,861 (-21.6%)

Context: 2026 January Wednesday night vs 2025 January Saturday afternoon, 2025 had 1994 team reunion

Villanova

Record: 6-10, 1-4 Big East
2026: 15,342
2025: 17,542
Change: -2,200 (-12.5%)

Context: 2026 January Saturday afternoon vs 2025 January Friday night

Providence

Record: 6-13, 1-7 Big East
2026: 13,881
2025: 16,094
Change: -2,213 (-13.8%)

Context: 2026 January Monday evening vs 2025 February Tuesday night, 2026 was MLK Day

Creighton

Record: 7-14, 2-8 Big East
2026: 14,115
2025: 17,756
Change: -3,641 (-20.5%)

Context: 2026 January Tuesday night vs 2025 January Friday night

Butler

Record: 8-15, 3-9 Big East
2026: 17,568
2025: 15,770
Change: +1,798 (+11.4%)

Context: 2026 February Saturday afternoon & National Marquette Day vs 2025 December Wednesday night

St. John’s

Record: 9-17, 4-11 Big East
2026: 14,389
2025: 17,983
Change: -3,594 (-19.99%)

Context: 2026 February Wednesday night vs 2025 March Saturday morning/Senior Day

DePaul

Record: 10-18, 5-12 Big East
2026: 14,582
2025: 14,728
Change: -146 (-0.99%)

Context: 2026 March Sunday afternoon & Markus Howard jersey honors vs 2025 February Tuesday night

Connecticut

Record: 11-19, 6-13 Big East
2026: 16,283
2025: 18,129
Change: -1,846 (-10.2%)

Context: 2026 March Saturday Morning & Senior Day vs #4 UConn vs 2025 February Saturday night & National Marquette Day vs #25 UConn

And one extra one, because the comparison is important.

National Marquette Day

2026: 17,568
2025: 18,129
Change: -561 (-3.1%)

HOT TAKE: Double digit declines in terms of percentages in seven of 10 games is bad! Heck, it’s seven of nine if you cut the 2026 National Marquette Day game a break because of course there was a upwards bump on that game. Sorry/not sorry, Butler. Conversely, the fade from NMD to Not NMD for the UConn game is one of the smaller year-over-year declines on record, and that even had the added bonus of “hey, who wants to see a top five ranked Huskies team,” but it still goes in the books as a double digit drop.

The two games that don’t have a double digit decline outside of Butler are DePaul and Seton Hall, and both are essentially unchanged. One is ever so slightly up, one is ever so slightly down. There’s an argument to be made that the combination of a Sunday afternoon and Markus Howard helped stop that DePaul game from falling more than 1% from the year before. I can straight up guarantee you that DePaul Athletic Director Dewayne Peevy had a hand in keeping that drop very small, as there was an entire upper deck section at Fiserv that was all DePaul fans that had bussed up from Chicago for the game and Peevy had bought them lunch along the way. I think it’s safe to say that there were at least 300 DePaul fans in that section, and 150 tickets sold is a roughly 1% change. Without the Blue Demon faithful in the building, that attendance drop is at least 3%.

There’s nothing in the numbers that objectively say that ticket sales were suffering further and further as the season went along. However, given the double digit percentage decline in attendance numbers in most of the games, I think it’s safe to say that there absolutely was a “why should we pay to see this not good team” impact. There may be some “season ticket prices went way up” explanation for some of the drop as well, but with just over 13K as MU’s lowest attended game of the season (vs Southern), I don’t think that had much of an impact on the dropoff in Big East attendance. The good news is that it wasn’t a devastating drop. Averaging over 14,400 fans per game is still pretty good, especially when most of high major Division 1 arenas aren’t even that large to start with.

The question from here going forward is: How many people who attended a 2024-25 game but not a 2025-26 game lost track of what’s going on with Marquette and won’t wander back if the team is a tournament contender next season?

Follow Anonymous Eagle on social media

Facebook: AnonymousEagle
Instagram: AnonymousEagleSBN
Bluesky: AnonymousEagle

Source link