U women’s hoops coach Elaine Elliott may not have been a math major back when she was in college, but she does have 10 fingers and 10 toes, and, more importantly, she knows how to use them.
And while her middle fingers most often spring into action whenever she passes by men’s hoops coach Rick Majerus, she generally has a more important task for her phalanges?counting the attendance for her team’s home games.
And while doing so usually doesn’t necessitate that she actually use all 20 digits, that doesn’t stop her from taking issue with the official attendance figures recorded by the U’s sports information staff.
“If those people are going to lie and stretch the number of people who actually show up to make us look good to the NCAA, they could at least make it a really absurd lie and get us ranked in the top 10 or something,” Elliott said. “Having really good attendance figures to cite to potential recruits?whether they’re true or not?really helps in getting those kids to come to a place like Utah.”
What Elliott has most taken issue with, is the SID’s estimate of 1,219 fans per home game?good for a ranking of 57th in the country in average fan attendance. The longtime U coach would like to see the latter two digits transposed, making the U’s attendance 1,291 per game, and serving to bump the school up to No. 9 nationwide in the attendance rankings.
“Anyone who’s ever been to one of our games?and believe me, there aren’t many?knows that the 1,219 figure is a bigger lie than anything that’s ever come out of any politician’s mouth,” Elliott said. “There might be 1,219 in attendance if you triple the number of people there and then count the head lice each of them has.
“So, if you’re going to fabricate things like that, why not at least make it worthwhile and help me get the No. 121 ranked recruit in the country, instead of No. 138?” she added.
SID personnel, however, were put off by the coach’s request that they deliberately fabricate the figures, and were further incensed by her expression of displeasure with their job performance.
“Look?do you think anyone on earth is going to believe that 1,291 people would show up to a U women’s basketball game?” asked sports information director Liz Abel. “Usually we include ourselves in those attendance figures, and god knows we sure don’t want to be there. So Elaine better cool it, unless she wants to see that number drop to 1,213 or something, because we could very easily do that.”
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