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There was a huge shake up in terms of priority seating and a lot of old timers, townies, university employees and such who had had their specific seats at our old Hearnes Center arena for years and years were bumped up, displaced etc.

Which is the crowd that shows up and makes noise. If you take away employees and their friends / relatives from Vanderbilt it would show up in their attendance numbers. These are the folks without the cash, but they make the arena look viable on TV.

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Thus on top of just having a quieter lower level like UK's has become, we also have a much more rampant no-show problem amongst the high dollar seats than we ever did in the old arena.

Big donors today are more corporate than individual. They only show up for the big games because it is the status symbol. While this may fill the coffers in the short run, it kills the next generation of fans. It may take 10 - 20 years from now to catch up, but it will catch up. Old school donors went to all the games and the secondary sports too, but this new group want the marquee games and don't care about the rest of the year.

Kentucky is the poster child of the future as Tubby had a home schedule worth the entire book. Now the schedule the chaff at home and play the big non conference games at neutral sites. Tubby played Izzo home and home and Rupp was rockin. This year they played in Chicago and the place was much quieter. To add insult to injury the season ticketholders no longer get option to buy the neutral games based on their priority points. These tickets now go to the professional scalpers (and blessed by the NCAA for a piece of the action) so why would donors want to give anymore.

Think of the lines for the movie Casino, and you get the bigger picture...

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The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over... In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it's like checkin' into an airport. If you order room service, you're lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it's all gone. You get a whale show up with four million in a suitcase, and some 25-year-old hotel school kid is gonna want his Social Security Number.

When you ask folks for money you are in the service business and nobody is teaching the younger folks what real service is. When the baby boomer die off, all that donor money is going to dry up too. We are getting back to Rome where the folks in the Senators boxes were living large and the folks upstairs were bidding on the meat of the dead just to not starve.