Attendance has long been an issue at basketball games at the University of Oklahoma. Unless the Oklahoma Sooners have a top-tier team and are playing a top-tier opponent, the fans rarely show up. That includes the student section.
In came Porter Moser. Moser has made a concerted effort to get students to the games. But what he found out, it doesn’t matter how much you plead for fans to come if you don’t have a winning team.
Let’s face it, Oklahoma is a football school. If you want to grab their attention, you need to put out a good product like softball has done. Earlier in the season, fans still rarely came. But the Sooners kept winning. Now, they are 8-0 and a top 25 team in the country.
So, come Tuesday, the fans were there. 7,234 of them were in attendance. They also made themselves felt several times during the game.
Milos Uzan and Javian McCollum talked about fan support.
“The atmosphere was great,” Uzan said. “The last four minutes, I saw everybody turn their lights off. I knew we had to take this home. I feel like in an environment like this, the more we keep winning, the more fans keep coming, and exciting things will happen.”
“It’s great playing at home and always having a huge fan base like that, being noisy for us, that helps us win the game,” McCollum said. “It helps tremendously. And hopefully, as the season goes on we keep building, and more people will come out and support us.”
If you haven’t gone out to watch this team yet, you need to. No, they don’t have the huge star like [autotag]Blake Griffin[/autotag], [autotag]Buddy Hield[/autotag] or [autotag]Trae Young[/autotag] but man they are a fun team to watch.
Their next game is against the Arkansas Razorbacks, and while it’s not a home game, it is being played in Tulsa, Okla. The Sooners have faced the Razorbacks several times in the past, and every time, it sounds more like an Arkansas home game than a Sooner home game. Time to change that this season.
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