Pitt's attendance notably declined in 2015-16

Even though the numbers weren’t yet available, the trend developing last season was obvious.

The Petersen Events Center, widely viewed as one of college basketball’s most raucous venues since it opened in 2002, lacked the same intensity and aura it had when Pitt was one of the sport’s top programs for a five or six-year stretch in the late aughts. People can cite a number of different reasons for that, but one of them doesn’t require a whole lot of nuance — there simply weren’t as many people there.

On Thursday, annual attendance figures from the NCAA revealed as much. During the 2015-16 season, Pitt’s average home attendance was 9,079, down from the 10,012 figure posted in 2014-15. Last season’s attendance mark was the program’s lowest in a season in which it made the NCAA tournament since moving to the Pete 14 years ago. Only one season, the infamous CBI run of 2012, saw lower attendance numbers (8,801).

Pitt's average attendance in 14 seasons at the Petersen Events Center (Craig Meyer/Post-Gazette)

The Panthers were eighth in the 14-team ACC in average attendance last season and 49th among Division I’s 351 teams. When removing the variable of venue size, Pitt was also eighth in the ACC in percentage of seats occupied (72.6 percent).

Pitt’s attendance fell 10.3 percent from the previous season, the third-biggest drop in the ACC, behind Boston College (-31.5 percent) and Syracuse (-10.5 percent), the former of which was an unspeakably awful major-conference basketball team.

ACC attendance numbers (Craig Meyer/Post-Gazette)

None of this, by the way, is a referendum on the fans. Fan-shaming has become a time-honored tactic in the age of social media — especially with Twitter accounts dedicated to photographing mostly-empty venues — but sports writers like myself, who get free admission to these games and (usually) free food, should almost always avoid chiding fans and telling them how to spend their time and money.

To me, the interesting thing about the attendance numbers from last season is that they give more credence to the theory that brewed much of that season, particularly once it ended — that Pitt basketball under Jamie Dixon, successful as it was, had gotten stagnant and created a certain level of apathy in the fan base. A weak non-conference slate — statistically, the program’s second-worst of the past decade — and a mediocre, .500 conference campaign certainly didn’t help, either.

Unless he’s inheriting an unrepentant dumpster fire of a situation, a first-year coach usually boosts attendance in college basketball, though we’ll see if that’s the case with Kevin Stallings. While his hire was met with raised eyebrows and, in some cases, outright anger, it feels like Pitt fans have warmed up a bit to the idea of him as the Panthers’ coach the past several months, both because of his own work and outside forces (i.e. never underestimate the power of the Pittsburgh sports media to elicit sympathy for a press conference subject).

Perhaps more than anything, what Dixon proved was that you can win big at Pitt and do so with the added advantage of one of the country’s best home-court advantages. Whether that can work with a different coach remains to be seen, especially for a program in a noticeably different position than it was even five years ago, from the man roaming the sideline to the size and tenor of the crowds that watch the games.

Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG