NEW ORLEANS — When Nevada and Southern Mississippi met in the Hawaii Bowl, the crowd — if you can call it that — at the 50,000-seat Aloha Stadium made it look as if a high school game was in progress.

That might not even be fair. The Hawaii state championship actually outdrew the Hawaii Bowl this season by 1,000.

Bowl attendance was down 2.1 percent overall this season through the first 31 games of the 35-game postseason. Bowl officials point toward a struggling economy as the reason for the dip in fans attending games, but the luck of the draw also plays heavily into how well a postseason game does at the gate. One thing you can count on: The solution for those unsightly rows of empty seats won’t be a big reduction in the full, some would say bloated, calendar of 35 bowl games.

The Hawaii Bowl had its attendance drop by about 22,000 to 19,411, mostly because Hawaii didn’t make it back to the game this season.

The Music City Bowl in Nashville, Tenn., had a drop of about 14,000 from last season’s game, which matched up Tennessee and North Carolina. This season, Mississippi State played Wake Forest. On the plus-side was The Little Caesar’s Pizza Bowl, which had an increase of 14,000 at Ford Field in Detroit to see Western Michigan play Purdue.

Dennie Poppe, NCAA vice president for Division I baseball and football, said the bowl licensing subcommittee will review the postseason in February.

— The Associated Press