Alot of the people that attended the game were retirees that relocate to stillwater and quite frankly remember the Iba era. That is where their attendance has suffered. In actuality, the student fan support has been the same as Oklahoma.
I strongly disagree with this.
The biggest single thing that has killed OSU basketball attendence since Sutton left has been the
decline in support by the OSU students. Their level of attendence now is
nowhere near what it used to be.
OSU student attendence was always important during old GIA, and they were one of the driving forces in the very strong attendence from when new GIA opened (2001) through essentially the end of the Sutton era.
The student sections in GIA are comprised of the sections behind each basket from the floor to the top.
Even on games when a lot of the season ticket holders didn't show up (mid-week games against crap non-conference opponents), the students would always show up and have both ends of GIA almost totally full.
As result, there were RARELY ever any games in the 2001-07 time frame with fewer than 10,000 people in the building, even for the worst opponents.
However, due to the Sutton debacle in 2006 and resulting horrible play by the team over the next 2+ years, student attendence started to decline at the beginning of the 2007 season (Sean's first full season) and it has never recovered.
(None of this is to say that "regular" season ticket holders are also not to blame, but to me this is the single biggest factor.)
A big part of the problem was simply having an entire senior class of OSU students who never experienced good basketball. The kids who were seniors last year got their first taste of an NCAA-tournament caliber team. The rest of the time they were in school, we were a mediocre also-ran.
Contrast that with the students that attended OSU from about 1990-2006. If you were a student in
that time frame, OSU was essentially in the tournament every year and there was a pretty darn good chance that you at least were there for one really special team (Final Four in 1995; Elite Eight in 2000; Final Four in 2004).
The only thing that will get the students back to where they were is consistently good basketball.