Around the country, there are few college basketball venues better than The Pit in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Over the past year, Fernando Lovo has seen that up close as the athletic director at New Mexico.
In transitioning to his new job as the athletic director at Colorado, Lovo knows the importance of a strong game day experience for fans of all sports and hopes to bring that to Boulder.
“It’s huge. That’s really important to me,” Lovo, who begins his job at CU this week, told BuffZone. “I’m fanatical about the game day experience. It’s something that I took from my time at the University of Texas. I saw how impactful it was to create. It’s not just a game. It’s got to be an event. It’s got to be engaging. It’s got to be dynamic.”
Last year, New Mexico ranked 24th nationally in men’s basketball attendance, averaging 13,051 fans per game. The Lobos’ women’s basketball team ranked 26th nationally, at 4,843 per game.
And in football this year, the Lobos had the largest jump in average attendance in the FBS, with 57.8% more fans at home games in 2025 than in 2024.
By comparison, CU was 69th nationally in men’s basketball attendance last year (7,038) and is averaging just 5,802 fans at home this year (not counting the game against Portland State when the general public wasn’t allowed at the Events Center due to dangerous wind conditions in the area). In women’s basketball, the Buffs averaged 2,967 fans (54th) last year and just 2,045 so far this year (82nd). Both numbers should increase as the Buffs get into conference play this month.
In football, the Buffs have done well in attendance under head coach Deion Sanders, but slipped this past year as the team sputtered to a 3-9 record. The Buffs averaged 52,514 fans at Folsom Field in 2024, and 50,459 this past season.
Lovo understands that putting a winning product on the court or field is essential to attendance, but said the game day experience has to be more than about getting people to the games.
“We’ve got to be creative with our scripting of our in-game scripts to keep people involved,” he said. “It’s not enough just to say, ‘Hey, come watch a game.’ That’s not the way we’re going to approach things. We’re going to look at how do we do things outside the venue? Inside the venue?”
Lovo said CU has to give fans a reason to decide they want to come to a CU event in the first place. Then, he said, it’s important to make it easy to get into building.
“Make parking ingress really easy, really convenient for them; getting into the building really easy,” he said.
Lovo said it’s then important to make the atmosphere exciting for fans once they’re inside the building.
“Obviously, we need to compete at a high level, but we’ve got to make it fun,” he said. “We’ve got to make it engaging. And that’s something that I focus on heavily, and I thought we did a really good job with that here at New Mexico, and engaged our fans. We’ve got great fans there at CU and I can’t wait to build on what’s already going on there, which I know is a lot of really good stuff, and try some things that hopefully catch people’s attention.”
The CU Events Center may not ever match The Pit, but Lovo is looking forward to trying to get the Buffs there.
“The Pit was tremendous in terms of the excitement and the environment, and that’s what we need (at CU),” he said. “We need that at our venues. Our home venues have to really create an advantage for us. They have to. That’s our job as administrators.
“We need to create a really exciting environment, and like I said, make it really fun and engaging for our fans, so that if people are in the stands and they’re loud, it has a tangible impact on winning and losing; it just does. That’s undeniable, so we’re going to work really hard at that.”
Brian Howell
Source link