FanPost

Filling Up Bobby Dodd Stadium

FP'd from the FanPosts. This summer, a lot of things are going on, so if you want your opinions Front Page'd just send me an email and I'll work you in. Keep on writing! - Winfield

 

It's really frustrated me in my past 2 years as a Tech student how difficult it seems to be to fill up Bobby Dodd's 55,000 seats for games, especially the higher-profile games. In the meantime, georgie seems to have no problem putting 92,000 people in the seats to watch them beat up on the Little Sisters of the Poor as they begin another doomed road to a National Championship they'll win due solely to being an ESSSS EEEE SEEEE school (alright, you get it, moving on).

Anyways, I was reading this article and I started thinking about what we could do to remedy our low-attendance problem. My first thought would be lowering ticket prices. Now, I understand how this is all about revenue-against-attendance, and there are a ton of variables involved (what seats are bought, price at different areas, and so on...) so I want to mainly look at the numbers for different scenarios.

The article's first paragraph mentions how a family of four can get single-game tickets to an ACC game for a minimum of $200. So if we sell 26,000 season tickets per year and 9,000 seats go to students, we can figure ~14,000 seats go to single-game tickets if we base our attendance around 49,000/game (the average of our '09 and '10 home schedules was 49,016). If we're selling single-game tickets at $50/ticket, we could make $700,000/game from 14,000 seats. Or, we could fill all 20,000 empty seats and make the same amount off of $35/ticket. I don't know about you, but $35 for a ticket (or $140 for four) sounds a lot more reasonable than what we're doing right now. Of course this is all assuming that things are held constant with an ideal supply-demand curve.

Another thought that I had was to set a deadline before kickoff (15 min before....hell, even AT kickoff) and say, "OK, any unused seats we have left go to the students for free." In this sense, A) you aren't really losing revenue because you weren't going to make money off of those tickets anyways, and B) you fill up the stands with people who are going to go crazy while watching their team play (all for free, which is all the more enticing for college kids).

What say you, readers? Should we lower ticket prices? Should we let crazy college kids in for free if tickets aren't sold? Is there a better, more efficient way you can think of for us to fill up the stands without sacrificing revenue?

FanPosts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the FTRS writing staff, and are spotlighted purely to create discussion.

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