No Fannies In The Seats: ACC Teams With Poor Attendance This Season

In fairness, most of these teams haven’t played well enough to interest fans very much.

One of the ACC’s distinguishing characteristics has been the vociferous devotion of its fans. This impression is doubtless attributable in part to the numerous occasions Duke and Cameron Indoor Stadium are on television, providing ubiquitous camera shots of the boisterous, demonstrably enthusiastic Cameron Crazies who at times can cheer so loudly neighbor can’t hear neighbor.

Similar intensity is also common at Clemson and more recently Virginia Tech and Louisville and on occasion at other sites.

For the longest time ACC devotion was portrayed in part as a function of traditional rivalries and attentive coverage in numerous regional newspapers, large and small. Of course, given the sorry state of daily papers, with many going out of business or shrunken to shadows of their former selves, it’s now school-centric Web sites that provide much of the local coverage. Afternoon papers vanished long ago, and tradition has become almost an afterthought.

Since the league’s earliest days, when it was an eight-team, four-state amalgamation, league leaders debated whether televising games helped or hindered home and tournament attendance.

A 2007 study published in the International Journal of Sports Management and Marketing showed home attendance actually increased for televised games (Hey, ma, look at me!). But that was before live-streaming and other forms of Net access become available. For the ACC that was also before it grew to 18 teams, many with modest fan support and little history between them.

Non-traditional ACC venues don’t appear to get a boost in attendance when a team joins the league. Certainly they don’t when hosting nonconference opponents. Other than meeting big-name rivals Duke and UNC, outlying programs must rely heavily on revenue and exposure from the package of 180 televised ACC regular-season games rather than on gate receipts.

The new western members didn’t draw much before they were added to the league – Cal and Stanford each drew less than a third of capacity in the nonconference portion of their 2025 schedules.

Miami, a perpetual league laggard in home attendance, had a seductive idea to boost home attendance shortly after joining the ACC. The school flirted with installing a hot tub available to students behind one basket at the Watsco Center. Depending on the gender of the tub users and how much or how little they wore, this promised to become a viewing highlight, even more so than the Speedo-clad male grad student who tried to distract opposing free throw shooters at Duke.

But staid league leaders quickly quashed the innovation at Coral Gables, where attendance and seating capacity have ticked up a bit (699 more fans, 972 more seats) since joining the ACC 20 seasons ago.