Mudville gets a life

For more than a decade, Duke students have done the impossible: maintained our famed obsession with men’s basketball while strengthening our academic commitments year-by-year. But as student attendance at men’s games has fallen for the fifth season in a row—undergraduate attendance now averages 650 per game, only slightly more than half of student section capacity—we must reckon with the possibility that Duke is losing its unique character as a top-ten university with a team worthy of a genuine sports school. If student interest in athletics is genuinely waning, we need to re-evaluate why we spend so much academic money on big-time sports.

To be sure, we should approach these statistics with caution. There are good reasons attendance might flag. Some of this season’s biggest games have happened in Madison Square Garden and not in Cameron, which bodes well for ticket sales but not for student attendance. And the myth that student seats in Cameron are hard to get is self-perpetuating: When students don’t show up, athletics staff sells more student seats and, when students do show up, they come to find student seats sold to paying customers.

Students subsidize University athletics—the University central fund forked over $14.3 million to athletics last year—partly so they can enjoy big-time college sports. If students find games unappealing for structural reasons—the weaker schedule, the canned cheers on the scoreboard and the now infamous noise meter—athletics needs to step up. They can start by introducing a more exciting home schedule, instead of holding some of the biggest games in Madison Square Garden, as they did with Michigan State.

At the same time, these numbers do point to a deeper trend—student attendance at home games has continued to decline even after Duke won the national championship in 2010. Starting in 2010, DukeEngage surpassed basketball as prospective students’ primary reason for applying to the University. Indeed, as the University has become increasingly selective in admissions, it follows that fewer students feel they can spare precious time and energy on attending games. Whereas standing in the cold for hours to get into a game used to be a point of pride for Duke fans, for many, it is now too high a price to pay. Why forgo homework and club meetings when the game can be streamed straight to your laptop?

If Duke students feel that athletics is a genuinely integral part of what Duke is, then subsidizing athletic expenses makes sense. Indeed, student interest is a necessary justification for a subsidy that inevitably detracts from the University’s academic prowess. But this also means that trailing student interests calls for a decreased athletics subsidy. If Duke cares less about athletics, that’s fine: We have plenty else to spend time and money and on.

Even the Duke Atheltics’ 2008 strategic acknowledged that a $15 million subsidy—double what it was in 2008—should be short-lived: “Increasing the yearly subsidy from central funds to $15 million­—while a viable short-term solution—is undesirable in the long term.”

Let’s see what happens to student interest when the Blue Devils have an exciting home schedule (in Durham, not New York). But if the Crazies are a dying breed, so be it.

Sam Davis, a line monitor, recused himself from this editorial.