Consider The House Full

All the hand-wringing over Washington State’s pathetic football attendance?

Forget it.

I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the Cougars actually LEAD the Pacific-10 Conference in attendance - and do most years.

Yes, more than 70,000 fans pack Husky Stadium on football Saturdays. Yes, more people watched Oregon State’s opener against North Texas than watched the Cougars play UCLA. And, yes, there have been 35 Pac-10 crowds larger than the Cougs’ best gate of the season.

It is undeniably so, all of it.

And so it should be.

But let’s face it - it isn’t a football season if you can’t beat up on WSU somehow. And since the team itself has, until this past weekend, proven itself to be unbeatable, the only other punching bag would seem to be the constituents - of which, critics contend, there aren’t nearly enough for a Top 25 team.

And they’d be right - if that Top 25 team was located just about any place other than Pullman, USA.

It has been noted before that the entire populace of Whitman County could not fill Martin Stadium, but that’s no longer true, exactly. The latest census figures peg Whitman’s population at 39,380, so a few citizens would have to wait outside the gates until halftime, when a hunk of almost every Martin crowd tends to bail out and never return, regardless of the score.

But it’s not as if Wazzu has the only remote campus in Division I. Starkville, Miss., is no Gotham, either.

And our research department tells us the average home attendance this season for 19th-ranked Mississippi State is 32,177.

Or exactly 420 more than 16th-ranked WSU.

Hmm. Do we see a trend here?

By golly, we do. Believe it or not, college teams in tiny markets actually draw fewer fans than do schools in bigger ones.

Wow. Next they’ll be telling us a few NBA players smoke pot.

Figuring there was no sense waking up the research staff for just that one assignment, we turned it loose on another: ranking how Pac-10 teams fare at the gate relative to their primary markets.

And guess what? Wazzu wins.

This is something we’ve suspected all along - that for all the grief we’ve heaped upon Spokane and Inland Northwest fans over the years for tepid support of all spectator sports, it really isn’t all that awful.

For the purposes of our survey, we defined primary market to include the home county of a Pac-10 campus, adjacent counties and those within a 3-hour drive - in effect, fans who could get to a game and back without an overnight stay.

So the Portland area gets counted in the Oregon and Oregon State figures, and Phoenix in the Arizona market - hardly unreasonable given the easy freeway access and large number of alumni living in those cities.

To be fair, we also extended Wazzu’s market into 11 Washington counties and seven in Idaho, presuming for the sake of argument that more than a handful of folks in Idaho give a rip about the Cougs.

Our findings are detailed in the accompanying table, but the upshot is this: Wazzu does better at the gate on a percentage basis than any other school in the Pac-10, and twice as good as half the schools.

The Cougars draw an average of 3.22 percent of their primary market area. The mean for the other nine schools - even counting shared areas like Portland and Phoenix only once - is just 1.47.

Does this mean Cougar attendance is everything it should be?

Probably not.

In every other Pac-10 market, pro sports siphon off many fans whose pockets can stand only so much picking.

And it says something that the Cougs of 1990 and 1995 - two dreadful teams - drew about as well as the current edition, which reached No. 10 in the polls and features the best quarterback the school has ever had.

Maybe it says those teams were over-supported. Mostly it says that WSU had better sell tickets - and sell hard - in April and not expect a huge walkup just because the team is 6-0 in October.

In fact, you can fret all you want about Wazzu’s pass defense heading into these final three games, but the hole the school really needs to plug is in its marketing mission.

We’ll cite a couple of examples - not damning, but curious.

Remember the flap over the “Stop TV Violence” ad campaign, and the decision to pull those commercials? Beyond the dubious theme, the most startling aspect of the whole mess was that both athletic director Rick Dickson and assistant Ron Davis said they weren’t available to screen the ads beforehand.

That’s right. The school’s major marketing thrust went to the public without inspection. Just how seriously do they take selling tickets down there, anyway?

That’s the same question Fred Antonius asked in a recent letter to us.

A Spokane banker, Antonius moved here from Yakima in 1994, saw a billboard pitching Cougar tickets last year, picked up the phone and purchased a pair of three-game packages.

“In 1997,” he wrote, “during the height of the ticket-buying (and selling) season, the total correspondence I received from WSU regarding ticket information was zero. No game schedule. No order form. No invitation to donate or participate in any way.”

When we followed up, Antonius stressed that he didn’t need the Cougs to drag him to the ticket window. He still knows the toll-free number.

“My point was, if they’re not marketing to someone such as myself - who is relatively new to the area and has spent money in the past - then they’re missing a golden opportunity,” he said. “You wonder how many potential ticket buyers are not being reached.”

And you wonder if it wouldn’t behoove Wazzu to cash in one football scholarship and give it to the merry marketeers of Brett Sports as a consulting fee. Cougar football doesn’t need canned rock music during timeouts, a la Chiefs hockey, but it sure could use the expertise in selling tickets.

The athletic department has mobilized for a November blitz, and will get a break because after losing to ASU, the Cougs aren’t nearly as telegenic.

But contrary to what you’ll hear from the shrill yahoos of talk radio and other commentators at large, sports consumers of the Inland Northwest are under no obligation to fill Martin Stadium - not when they already give Cougar football better fanny support, per capita, than any other Pac-10 school receives.

One Seattle columnist contended Cougar fans should buy tickets even if they can’t use them, just because the team is so special. Someone able to do that, or even suggest it, is obviously making too much money.

You can coax more people into Martin Stadium. But you aren’t going to harangue them there.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Graphic: Cougars are No. 1…in a way

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review