{"id":3393,"date":"2012-03-08T12:54:50","date_gmt":"2012-03-08T17:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/capitalsports.us\/?p=3393"},"modified":"2012-03-08T12:54:50","modified_gmt":"2012-03-08T17:54:50","slug":"early-thoughts-on-the-acc-tourney-hess-honored-small-crowd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/?p=3393","title":{"rendered":"Early thoughts on the ACC tourney: Hess honored, small crowd"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Despite the first game of the ACC basketball tournament being a good one, the attendance could hardly be called a crowd. As one Twitter said, &#8220;I&#8217;ve seen bigger crowds for noon Canes-Thrashers games in this building than this ACC game.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>The three referees working the Wake Forest-Maryland opening game have &#8220;KH&#8221; written with white tape on their shoes, evidently in tribute to Karl Hess, who came under fire for ejecting two former NC State players from the stands of a game earlier this season.<\/p>\n<p>John Clougherty, head of ACC officials, says that Hess is not going to work the ACC tournament because he didn&#8217;t want to be a distraction.<\/p>\n<p>Back to the attendance issue: The ACC&#8217;s regular-season attendance declined for the fourth consecutive year in 2011-12, with the average home crowd falling to 9,632. Attendance has dropped 13.8 percent from 2005-06, which was the first season the ACC had the current 12 teams. <\/p>\n<p>Only Virginia and North Carolina saw increases in attendance this season.<\/p>\n<p>The reasons are varied &#8211; including rising ticket prices, strange times and days to accommodate TV, and convenience of watching all the games in high definition rather than fighting traffic to get to games.<\/p>\n<p>But, in relation to the ACC tournament, the main problem is playing the games in Atlanta. If the tournament were in Greensboro, it would be a happening and a lot more people would be there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite the first game of the ACC basketball tournament being a good one, the attendance could hardly be called a crowd. As one Twitter said,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,79,81,1,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-duke-blue-devils","category-featured-stories","category-n-c-state-wolfpack","category-uncategorized","category-north-carolina-tar-heels","wpcat-82-id","wpcat-79-id","wpcat-81-id","wpcat-1-id","wpcat-80-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3395,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3393\/revisions\/3395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/capitalsportsnc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}