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The Sun Belt Conference may have made some strides in its first five years of football, but there's one area that the league teams need to improve dramatically if they're ever going to be viewed as more than a bottom tier member of Division I-A.
No team in the Sun Belt averaged 20,000 fans per game last year, and no team averaged as many as 19,000 in its conference games.
Troy had the best announced attendance in the league last year, drawing an average of 19,425 fans overall and 18,763 in Sun Belt games.
UL ranked second in both categories at 17,591 overall and 17,451 in league games. No one else got to 17,000, unless you count Arkansas State's artificial average of 18,381.
ASU played a game against Missouri at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City -- in Missouri -- which counted as a "home" game for the Indians. Without that game, ASU was at 15,476.
<center><p><a href="http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060817/COLUMNISTS15/60817003/1006/SPORTS" target="_blank">The rest of the story</a>
Dan McDonald
dmcdonald@theadvertiser.com
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Are those numbers getting better? Slowly, yes. Six of the eight league teams showed attendance increases last season, and four of the eight increased by more than 70 percent.
Those are admirable figures and they show a trend toward success, but they also show how far some of the league programs needed to come.
The league's still in its infancy, heading into its sixth year, and this is the first year that a couple of the schools (UL Monroe and Florida Atlantic) have been full-fledged league members in all sports.
But it's up to each of the schools to figure out how to put butts in the seats, and that -- plus winning its share of out-of-conference games -- is how the league is going to get better.
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