Determinants of UNG Men's Basketball Attendance

Previous research has found on-court performance has a positive impact on attendance in NCAA Men’s Basketball [see e.g. Hwang (2016)]. For this study we aim to test this finding for UNG Men’s Basketball over an eight-season span from 2015-16 to 2023-24. Game-level attendance will be modeled using ordinary least squares regression with winning percentage (i.e. performance) as our primary independent variable. Control variables include day of competition, opponent, and whether it was a conference game. We suspect that conference games will have a higher attendance because there is a sense of familiarity with conference schools among students. We also plan to test for the influence of venue, as the Lynn Cottrell Convocation Center became the home of UNG basketball in 2018; previously, games had taken place in the much smaller Memorial Gymnasium.  Since men and women always play doubleheaders for conference games, we also take into account the quality of the UNG women’s basketball team. Finally, we control for the popular “Spirit Night,” which we expect is correlated with increased attendance. After gathering all the data and conducting the proper analysis we expect this research to be of value to the UNG Athletics Department for scheduling non-conference games, potential doubleheaders, and marketing.