Will More Empty Seats Mean Pelphrey Trouble?

I’m back.

That’s what Michael Jordan famously faxed when he went public with his intention of returning to the NBA after a foray into Major League Baseball back in March 1995. It was a few months after that when I started working as a full-time sportswriter.

From the summer of ’95 until the spring of 2009, that was my gig. Along the way, I was fortunate enough to be given column-writing duties at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Predictably, that led to a lot of writing about all things Razorback. Sometimes the columns were perceived as positive and sometimes they were perceived as negative.

Either way, my goal never changed. Having grown up a Hog fan, I simply wrote what I believed to be the truth, what I thought a Hog fan would want to know.

Well, I’m back. There will be a business slant this time around, given the nature of this publication, but otherwise the goals remain the same: to add unique perspective while giving you what you want to know about all things Razorback and the many other sports-related happenings in Northwest Arkansas.

And that brings us to what’s happening over at Bud Walton Arena these days. With apologies to the players, who have poured in more sweat equity than most of us will ever know, the product simply isn’t selling.

Paid attendance through Arkansas’ first 10 home games is a paltry 11,086. In an arena that holds about 19,000 people, that’s barely 58 percent of capacity.

Actual attendance is even worse. Using the estimated totals released by the University of Arkansas, the actual number of fannies in seats is less than 6,400 per game (about 33 percent of capacity).

 Those numbers likely will escalate to some degree now that the conference season is under way. Still, that many empty seats is exactly the kind of thing that usually buys a coach some extra tee times.

In Arkansas’ case, though, and as much as some restless fans won’t want to hear it, Razorbacks basketball remains a money-maker. That’s according to the folks at both Forbes.com and CNNMoney.com.

CNNMoney’s report ranked Arkansas 10th nationally in terms of profit ($7.76 million) last season, while Forbes’ report ranked Arkansas the 14th-most valuable team ($14.6 million) in the country. And while both entities have different ways of deciphering information provided by the U.S. Department of Education to get their results, the notion Arkansas makes money off its hoops team is rock-solid.

Does Arkansas stand to slip in this season’s rankings, likely to be released in March? Given the sagging attendance numbers, probably.

Would shrinking profits be enough to lead athletic director Jeff Long to dump coach John Pelphrey? Or does the collective promise of a shiny recruiting class buy Pelphrey more time?

Sadly, those questions, and not how deep into March this team will be playing, seem to be the ones most Arkansas basketball fans are pondering these days. Well, at least the ones who still bother to show up for the games. 

You can bet athletic director Jeff Long will be pondering them, too, if he hasn’t already started. If we’ve learned one thing about Long, after all, it’s that he’s a bottom-line guy.

And when those cash-generating suites are available for practically every remaining game, the bottom line isn’t perfectly healthy. It’s one thing to have some empty cheap seats, but another to have the ones built to hold big-dollar donors and corporate sponsors collecting dust.

In the end, those losses might prove Pelphrey’s most costly.