College basketball attendance is a difficult thing to predict and explain. I've been reading that OSU has bad attendance, but they are also a bad team playing in a bad arena. Akron is a good team playing in a bad arena. I went to the Wake vs #10 Virginia game last weekend and there were easily 4,000 empty seats in a 14,000 seat arena that is pretty average for an extremely meaningful game for Wake.
I'm past the point of caring about crowd size when I go to a game. In fact, the fewer the better as far as I'm concerned.
The JAR is old enough now that Joe Akron has probably been to an event there. The truth is this, it's a bad place to watch an event unless you have a chair back. Winter is bad enough in NE Ohio. Braving the cold to go to a game to sit in bleachers that can only make a chiropractor smile isn't a very attractive Saturday afternoon for a lot of people.