NC State led the nation in men’s basketball attendance increase. But how many fans actually showed up?

When Will Wade stood on a makeshift stage for his NC State introductory press conference inside Reynolds Coliseum in late-March 2025, he arrived with an oozing sense of confidence. Dressed in a gray pinstripe suit with a light blue button-up shirt and a red and white striped tie, he felt a need to energize the Wolfpack fans. Wade used his overwhelming sense of self-confidence to his advantage. He set out to sell tickets at an exceedingly high level with his first goal of creating a capacity crowd for the 2025-26 season opener against North Carolina Central inside Lenovo Center this past November.  The Wolfpack reached that goal, on paper at least, with its first season-opening capacity crowd since the building’s first game in 1999. The momentum from Wade’s speech led to season ticket sales spiking, too, surpassing pre-COVID-19 totals for his first — and only — season leading NC State. The program hit recent highs in season tickets sold, issuing 10,302 (the most since the 2016-17 season) at the start of the year, while it reported an average attendance of 16,341 fans per game to lead all of Division I basketball with a plus-3,278 figure in the stands, according to data from the Extra Points Library.  It was a mark that Wade, who left NC State for LSU in March, touted on a recent podcast interview with CBS Sports’ Jon Rothstein. “The fan support is phenomenal,” Wade said of NC State. “They’ve got some of the most-passionate fans in all of college basketball to fill up that arena.” But that doesn’t tell the whole story. NC State, which featured five reported sell outs this past season, had plenty of empty red seats to the naked eye throughout the venue at each of its 16 games inside the cavernous NHL arena.  TheWolfpacker.com dug into the numbers, using an open records request, to get the complete picture. And when it comes to the actual tickets scanned figure, NC State’s men’s basketball crowds were smaller — and on some cases, drastically lower — than what the athletic department proudly displayed throughout the season.