There are a lot of things that are quintessential to the UCLA experience: walking up the Hill after a long day of classes, eating ice cream at Diddy Riese and watching some of the best college sports teams in the country. It’s just that the last one may come with the chance to see scores of empty seats.
UCLA’s status as the school with the most NCAA titles may be outdated, but there’s no doubt the school has a prestigious athletic pedigree. Lonzo Ball, Troy Aikman, Russell Westbrook and Chase Utley are some of the many prominent athletes who have graced UCLA’s campus over the last few decades. With future pro athletes and Olympians working to master their crafts, one would expect UCLA to have one of the most rabid and enthusiastic fanbases in all of college sports.
But this is not the case.
Over the years, UCLA has struggled to fill stands, especially in what are known as the revenue sports: football and men’s basketball. The football team has seen attendance fall over the last five years, not even managing to fill out 60,000 seats for the 2018 USC game. Men’s basketball has struggled to sell out Pauley Pavilion. Even though NBA-level talent has passed through the arena, attendance often falls below the 10,000 mark.
There are a lot of reasons that can be suggested for this – it could be lack of appeal, too many other activities to do in Los Angeles or just a cultural distaste toward college athletics at UCLA. At a university that prides itself on athletic achievement, low attendance prompts the question of what this means for the university overall and why people aren’t paying attention.
Since firing a football and men’s basketball coach in consecutive years, it’s fair to say UCLA’s major sports are struggling. Arguably, that’s apparent in fan attendance.
Football has not sold out in the last couple years, but it did average over 76,000 fans – the highest in the Pac-12 – when the team was more successful during the first half of the Jim Mora era, which started in 2012, according to UCLA Athletics. Meanwhile, there’s o