Castiglione tells a story that goes all the way back to his days as a young athletic administrator at Missouri. In the mid-1980s, the Sooners and the Tigers were two of the preeminent powers in the Big Eight. Most years he would accompany Missouri during its annual trek to Norman.

Missouri was loaded with talented players and OU basketball had become a national power. The Sooners won four conference titles from 1984 to 1989 and entered the NCAA Tournament as the No. 1 seed three times.

But what Castiglione remembered most was the empty seats at Lloyd Noble Center.

“This dynamic that’s existed with basketball has been here forever,” he said. “Yet people have done an exceptional job overcoming it in a lot of ways.”

Sampson reached the NCAA Tournament 11 times in 12 seasons at OU. The Sooners also won the Big 12 tournament three times and shared the 2004-2005 regular-season title.

On paper, the attendance figures look fine.

Lloyd Noble Center holds 12,000 and OU averaged 11,806 for its 15 home games this past season. But those figures were for tickets sold.

Sooner fans are notorious for purchasing season tickets and only showing up for big games against arch-rivals or top-ranked teams.

Castiglione said that has to change for OU to truly reach an elite level.

“We have to get people out of this cherry-picking mentality of thinking they’ll buy the tickets and use them three or four times a year,” he said. “For some reason, we can’t get a number of those people out of that habit. We’ve tried every little technique that is known in marketing and promotion. Some of them are things we started for the first time and other schools are copying and having success. We’re trying everything. We’ll keep doing it. We’re trying to make something happen that’s never really happened at Oklahoma.”

Castiglione hopes the coach he brings in will help change that and finally end the belief nothing can co-exist with football.

“What we want to do is embrace what we have,” Castiglione said. “We want to find out whether or not it is in fact possible to command a high level of interest in both.”

John Shinn366-3536jshinn@normantranscript.com