One other thing on attendance......
some schools buy into the fact that its OK to give 1000s of tickets away or dollar night at almost every game. When you do that it devalues your season tickets. Western will discount tickets $5 or so during Christmas break or things like that. Or maybe have a club night where the kids from the boys and girls club gets in free or school kids with a ticket bought by a parent. But only when school is out.
Ive seen this at a lot of SBC and CUSA road games...stop at a store or a Wendy's and they offer you a ticket to the game with the meal or $1. Ark St was the worse...I saw people with handful of tickets at stop lights (heading to the stadium) giving FB tickets away. I can guarantee you Western would sell out all home football games if they offered freebies or $1 tickets.
Rice has 2k at a football game and you check the box score and see 22k listed as attendance, they are not the only school doing this.
UTEP's stadium is so large they have to offer free to cheap tickets or it would look empty. Same goes for basketball....they like others count the corporate blocks of tickets that is given out for donations.
Those of us in smaller stadiums and arenas dont get to do that because ...it devalues season tickets sold. As I said earlier Western fans are not easily to give up their basketball season tickets even in really bad seasons because that ticket will not be there next year.
My basketball season tickets are in section 106 2nd row (7 rows from the visitors bench) and we been looking to move to priority 1 seating or Red Towel for 5 years. In that time there's never been 2 open seats together. But you will see 50, 100, 200, or more empty in those sections for most games.
But if Western ran a ton of $1 or $5 nights it might make some season ticket holders think... $300 a ticket plus donation or sit somewhere else and pay for games you attend...some $1 or $5