Originally Posted by jumpin' joe
I don't see your suggestion as viable from a ticket sales standpoint. Teams and sites announced on Sunday night gives no time for ticket sales. UD works year round to fill the Arena for those games. It would be embarrassing for the NCAA and teams to play in front of a couple thousand fans at most. To make it work, the NCAA would have to put some of their cards on the table like letting certain sites know in advance that they will have a 1 vs 16 seed game or a 5 vs 12 game. I don't see that happening.
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The schools would sell more tickets, but you're right about the rest of the crowd. The overall attendance would go down big time.
The problem is this. The schools essentially learn that they're in on Sunday night, and then they get their ticket allotment, and if they're playing on Tuesday they basically have about four hours to sell them before they have to return them, which is very hard to do on one day's notice. I think that the participating schools would have better luck selling tickets if they were all in the same location, because from what I understand most fans who plan on traveling wait until after the First Four game.
To your point, if they did it at the sites for the Round of 64/32 games, they would almost have to do something similar to what baseball does and basically have a 'ticket if necessary' for those that buy the full package, but even then it would probably be a sparse crowd for the two 16 v 16 games.