Auburn can't sell football tickets/operate in black

Amazing, I thought.

http://online.wSportsJournalists.com/articles/while-football-ticket-prices-soar-auburn-struggles-to-profit-1415750933?KEYWORDS=auburn

rb

 

It's not that they CAN'T sell the tickets, it's that they choose not to.

Rather than risk releasing the tickets into the open market where opposing fans might buy them at inflated prices, they advertise them only to big-money boosters who end up buying them at face value and giving them away.

I think SEC stadiums have over-expanded. As wildly passionate as their fan bases are, there's a limit to how much people are willing to spend for non-premium games when they can just stay at home and watch it in HDTV.

 

Pure idiocy.

Even if opposing fans buy up the remaining tickets, at a school like Auburn, I'm guessing that's just a couple thousand tickets.

 

Auburn can't sell all its tickets to its fanbase.

My bad.

rb

 

I think we probably have reached the point where a lot of teams, even ones with rabid fanbases are going to have trouble filling their expanded stadiums on a regular basis. I would have thought SEC football would have been the exception to that rule, but I think this proves that if you want a full stadium, you can't get picky about who you allow to buy tickets.

 

And there's a distasteful arrogance about this — a sort of provincialism-within-provincialism.

In so many words, you're telling opposing fans they're not welcome in your stadium.

 

SEC needs a player salary cap

 

I understand what you're saying, but I think what they're trying to do is ensure that the home fans -- who've donated, paid for season tix, etc. -- don't find themselves in the midst of a visiting crowd. If I were an Auburn fan and had done all that, it'd piss me off to find myself sitting in amongst a passel of Alabama fans.

 

Yeah, but they're not talking about 20,000 unsold tickets, they're talking about 2,000 or so in an 85,000-seat stadium, and most of those probably in the upper deck at that.

 

Part of the intercollegiate experience is seeing fans of other teams. Or are SEC fans as abhorrent as NFL fans?

 

This sounds more like an "Auburn has lazy and not very bright marketing folks" problem than a "structure of college athletics" problem.

 

In the part of the story I read, they were talking about prime (between the 30-yard lines) seats.