Cowboys’ last stand

by George Kay
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 12:09 PM MDT

The University of Wyoming Cowboys enter what is very likely the final week of their basketball season without a huge amount of hope.

First off, the Pokes need to win today’s Mountain West Conference play-in game against Colorado State.

Wyoming has beaten CSU twice this season, but now the Cowboys need to make it three straight over the Rams to even gain a berth in the conference tournament, which starts on Thursday in Las Vegas.

And to make matters more difficult, a victory today over CSU means that Wyoming must take on conference champion BYU in the first round of the MWC tourney.

While not impossible by any means, the Cowboys’ road to a tournament championship is at best a huge challenge. Not impossible, mind you, but an uphill battle to be sure.

Wyoming goes into today’s pig-tail game with five wins and 11 losses in conference play, good for eighth place. Overall, the Pokes have won a dozen times, while losing 17, so the only hope of postseason play after this week would be a conference tournament championship and the automatic NCAA berth.

And that is a virtual impossibility.

This has certainly been a challenging season for Wyoming, although at times Coach Heath Schroyer’s team has exhibited notable improvement.

One fact points to the failure of the Cowboys to capture the fancy of Wyoming fans and that fact is home attendance, or the lack of it.

UW opened the Arena-Auditorium in 1982 with a full house of more than 15,000. This season, attendance at the AA has been the lowest ever. That is a span of 26 years, and attendance at Cowboy home games is at the lowest point ever in the so-called “Dome of Doom”.

Even taking into account the paucity of victories by the Pokes, it is still troubling to note the trend of small crowds for the home games.

There is no substitute for success in attracting large, supportive crowds to the Laramie games. A substantial turnaround in that area will be a pressing need as Schroyer and company look ahead to future seasons.

Apparently, UW is not alone in dwindling basketball attendance. A recent Sports Illustrated article tells of a decline in attendance at a number of colleges nationwide.

The story in Sports Illustrated blames several factors for the decline, including obnoxious fans and the unpleasant atmosphere at some college arenas.

Alcohol abuse is a problem at some venues, but that isn’t a factor at Wyoming, and I don’t believe the fans at the AA are so loud and abusive as to turn off fellow spectators.

On the contrary, there has been a general lack of enthusiasm and passion at Cowboy games this winter, so I would conclude that the lack of a quality product has been the major reason for declining crowd size.

Some observers point to the increasing interest in UW women’s basketball as it compares to the Cowboys. To be sure, the Cowgirls have been much more successful than their male counterparts, but attendance at the women’s games has not been so terrific either.

At last week’s home court victory over BYU, about 6,000 fans were in attendance. That hardly reflects a tremendous outpouring of support, even though the Cowgirls have been a success story that has carried over from last year’s NIT championship.

Maybe there is simply a general decline in interest in basketball in our state. The Wyoming high school tournaments have been played over the last two weekends in Casper, and attendance has been slightly lower than we have come to expect.

Much of any decline in attendance can be attributed to the field of teams involved in the tournaments and that will vary over the years, so we may not be seeing a trend, but just a single season anomaly.

Still in all, the attendance at the state high school wrestling tournament last month at the Casper Events Center was at an all-time high.

Again, it is probably not wise to draw concrete conclusions from the figures this winter, but it gives us something to consider in future years.

Print this story   |   Email this story