Large, wild crowds aren't the first notice of a recruit. The first notice is the school showing a fun style of play. Some ingredients in that are lots of winning, plenty of scoring, lots of on-court energy, teammate camaraderie, recruits' extrapolating all that to assure the HC is tops, etc. etc. Of course, provide all that and you attract reflective crowds.
I would hazard a guess that attendance grew to a peak with our repeat national champs team. Lots of wins, max fun, max crowd to see "crowd-pleasers".