The Great Duke Attendance Scam

It's not really a scam; that's a sensationalist headline. Just jumping the gun on what will spend all day being a very dumb story. Because it is about Duke, and every story about Duke eventually breaks down to the lowest common denominators of the pro-Duke and anti-Dook factions flinging feces at each other across the Internet. Duke is the Tim Tebow of colleges.

So it seems that Duke student attendance has dropped steadily over the past five years at Cameron Indoor, to a low of 650 per game this year. That's barely half the capacity of the student section, so the university has quietly been selling student tickets to non-student attendees.

"It has nothing to do with the revenue. We just want it to be full," Director of Marketing and Relations Mike Forman said. "If there were 1,200 students every game we would love it."

Only the big matchups sell out the student section—last year, just UNC and Michigan State. For every other game, the seats are $65 and first offered to supporters of the athletic department's fundraising arm. There are probably all sorts of logical reasons attendance is down, but save your logic for discussing something that's not as polarizing as Duke. Like Penn State football.

Low attendance forces Duke Athletics to sell student seats [Duke Chronicle]