Barta: Solution to 'Orange Krush'? Get better, fill arena

The fan in Iowa athletics director Gary Barta got "riled up" Wednesday night when nearly an entire section of Carver-Hawkeye Arena turned into the "Orange Krush."

But don't look for Iowa to enforce an black-and-gold honor pledge before they sell tickets to men's basketball games. The solution, Barta said Thursday, is basically get better and fill the arena.

"When they showed themselves in their orange gear, the fan in me got riled up," Barta said. "I didn't like it. I guess I credit them for their creativity and getting it done. At the end of the day, they didn't do anything wrong.

"We've got to take offense to it as fans, and I'm including myself, we've got to fill up the house so there aren't tickets available."

Just before tipoff Wednesday night, Illinois fans dressed in Iowa gear revealed themselves as the "Orange Krush" before Iowa's game against Illinois. The "Orange Krush" is the nickname for the Illini's student section at Assembly Hall in Champaign.

Barta's first thought was, "How did that happen? So, I immediately asked the ticket office to tell me how it happened."

The group used Iowa addresses to purchase the tickets. Generally, opponents' tickets are spread out, higher in the arena and worked around Iowa's fan base. That's an industry standard in the Big Ten, Barta said.

The "Krush" kept the Iowa fan ruse going until tipoff, even booing their Fighting Illini when they were introduced.

"We had a lot of Orange Krush there," Illini guard Demetri McCarney said. ". . . It felt just like a home game."

Iowa coach Todd Lickliter said, "Did they pay? OK, good. They obviously traveled well. Those seats are empty, so they filled them."

Maybe not to the same extent, but Wednesday night, Carver-Hawkeye became Assembly Hall West, kind of like the way Iowa football fans used to make the Metrodome "Kinnick North" for games against Minnesota. UM athletics tried to enact a screening process for tickets, packaging the Iowa game with others to try to prevent that.

Iowa won't do that, Barta said.

"We're going to control we can control," he said. "We're going to go out and try to market better, try to sell better, get more fans into the arena.

"Todd is going to continue what he's been doing. That's make this team better. We're young, but I'm excited. The feedback I'm getting, all of us would like to be farther along, but we have a young group, freshmen and sophomores mostly, they're working their butts off, so we're going to get better as a team, work harder to fill the arena and then it won't be an issue."

The Hawkeyes (8-15, 2-8 Big Ten) have struggled with competition and attendance all season. Iowa ranks ninth among Big Ten schools, averaging 9,164 tickets sold per game, and is one of three schools without a sellout this year. The actual attendance figures are worse, averaging 4,591.

In August, Iowa sliced prices for all of its men's basketball tickets. Season tickets were cut by nearly 20 percent, and price declines on single-game tickets as well. Public season tickets dropped to $278, a $58 reduction from last year.

Single-game ticket prices also were cut. All weekend Big Ten games were reduced by $2 to $25. All midweek Big Ten games, the ACC-Big Ten Challenge matchup against Virginia Tech and the intrastate game against Drake are $20 a ticket, also a $2 reduction. The other non-conference games were chopped nearly in half at $12 a ticket.

"The arena isn't as filled as I'd like it to be, or any of us, including the coaches, fans, student-athletes, so we'll just keep working on new ideas," Barta said. "The one thing I committed to, we did dramatically reduce prices. We're likely not going to have anymore reductions, we're just going to keep getting better, keep working on promotions to fill the arena and have fun.

"As Todd's team continues to get better and starts winning, I know it'll fill up. I know it will. It already has the last couple weeks. The team is playing better and you've seen the arena start to fill back up."

Barta hired Lickliter away from Butler in 2007, after Butler's appearance in the NCAA tournament's sweet 16. Lickliter is in his third season at Iowa and has a 36-51 record. 

Barta used the Iowa football coaching staff as an example of the lightning rod industry college sports is. He said in 2006 and '07, he received tons of e-mail on Iowa's coordinators Norm Parker (defense) and Ken O'Keefe (offense). All of it was negative, asking for them to be fired. Some of the e-mails and "the internet world, the external world" also were directed to head coach Kirk Ferentz.

Now, Barta said, they're talking about an Orange Bowl victory.

"Today, whatever's being said about men's basketball, I just have to say we hired a terrific coach," Barta said. "He has a long history of coaching great basketball, recruiting well, having values that we share at Iowa.

"It's not going the way we'd like to yet, by his standards, by my standards, by any fans' standards, but I am seeing some progress. I am still believing in what he's doing, what he's teaching. He hasn't forgotten how to coach. I liken back to how to you try to manage it, I liken back to when a lot of people decided Norm didn't know how to run a defense anymore."

Barta sees hope in the future, with this young team, which counts heavily on sophomores Matt Gatens and Aaron Fuller and freshmen Cully Payne, Eric May and Brennan Cougill, and the 2010 recruiting class.

"I'm 100 percent behind Todd," Barta said. "I'm not excited yet where we're at, but I'm excited with the young guys on our team, his principles, his philosophies. We've got this group of young people who are getting better every day."