Pitt's Blue-Gold Game Attendance Disappointing By Comparison

We knew Pitt's Blug-Gold game attendance wasn't very good. But how did it rank in comparison to other programs around the country.

Um, pretty bad.

Most of the BCS-conference schools in Division I offered attendance figures for their spring game and Pitt ranked 49th out of 60 teams with an estimated attendance of about 4,600 people.

I broke the whole Blue-Gold game thing down before and the bottom line is that the inability to draw even 5,000 fans during a time of year when many fans are football starved is an utter embarrassment. When I gave some ways for Pitt to improve the game a few weeks back, I also mentioned that this is supposed to be a major Division I program and that they should act like it.

That mindset hasn't changed for me and Pitt needs to do whatever it can to drum up interest in this event. It's not only a way to build excitement for the upcoming season, but recruits pay attention to this stuff. Do you really think that high school seniors Pitt is recruiting aren't impressed by the fact that Penn State draws more for a spring game than the Panthers do for a big-time regular season game?

Think again.

The flipside is that the Big East didn't do all that well in terms of attendance. Rutgers and Louisville both drew about 15K, but the rest of the conference was about 5,000 or less. Still, though, I'd like to think Pitt's goals should be a bit higher than the middle of the pack in the Big East. Five ACC schools had at least 10,000 and it'd be nice if Pitt could at least approach that figure.

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