Season Tickets, Boosters, Clubs and Mandetory Donations

[MarqHusker]

Badge, one of my buddies was fuming about the end of the Mendota Gridiron club . Perhaps a better off off season topic but do you have any insight on that. He blamed Chryst hating microphones.   Kind of an interesting topic.   Are booster clubs important anymore.

[847badgerfan]

I'm still a member, but the insider stuff you'd get ended with Andersen leaving. PC plays everything close to the vest. It's not that he doesn't like microphones. He doesn't like to talk about things related to the inner workings of his program, with respect to the kids. He is super-private with all of that stuff. King Barry has his back on that.



Mendota was on borrowed time since the Badger Fund (UW Foundation) took over the reigns on who gets tickets, perks, etc. This was in the early 2000's. Honestly, I'm surprised it lasted this long.

I still have one of these on my car.

[MarqHusker]

I think he was also expressing, though not explicitly, (what a lot of long time season ticket holders have said all over the country),  WTF am I paying for?  He's ditching his seats (though mostly due to his boys having games all over the place on weekends.   I think (some) fans like the luncheons and bull sessions with any of the coaches who spend an evening backslapping for an hour or two.   The metal bench isn't cutting it. (old news here).

again, fodder for a different thread, perhaps we unearth an old one, but the season ticket/donor model is getting stressed pretty good these days. 

[ELA]

My dad keeps his tickets because he enjoys the experience, but the caliber of the game doesn't even really matter to him anymore. He usually sells one or two games a year, including one big one, that pays off the five he goes to.  my younger brother and his wife are on a tailgate every weekend, so he can just walk from the house to the tailgate to the game.  Go home, already paid for, skipping the two games that he sold to watch on TV what she says is just as good anyway.

He let the whole booster thing go probably close to 20 years ago at this point. I think with the rise of places like this and even more so obviously the public ones, the type of information that came out of those types of relationships was dwindling anyway.  I remember the last Michigan football event I went to in that capacity sitting with Brady Hoke when he was just the defensive line coach and him telling me he was convinced he was going to win out to get Gabe Watson on the defensive line over the offensive line.  It was probably 2001, and who was I going to tell?  Wouldn't get that kind of info now.

[MarqHusker]

That's sort of what I told this friend.    I remember my brother was at a big corporate event within the past decade, and Saban was the speaker, of course he had the whole speech recorded on his phone.    You can't say anything anymore.

We could run a multi page thread of (not within the Wisconsin Offseason Thread of course) the names of Coaches that would've never lasted 1/5 as long as they did in this day.   Bob Knight and Al McGuire come to mind right away.

[847badgerfan]

I think he was also expressing, though not explicitly, (what a lot of long time season ticket holders have said all over the country),  WTF am I paying for?  

As you know, this is what happened with me. My money goes to a better spot in Madison now - to students who need the help. Anyway, yeah, the metal bench thing.. no mas. Two people with lumbar fusions don't get along with those things anyway. 

That, and we no longer find it fun to be squeezed into a mini-seat. Camp Randall would be best served to get down to about 60K seats. Real seats. Michigan too. Theirs are even more narrow than the ones in Madison. 60K would do them fine.

[Entropy]

I gave up my season tickets (and donations) when my kids activities made it difficult to see more than 1 or 2 home games and it became clear I was just a number.  Each year we got less for the donations... both in terms of info and events.   At one point I had 10 tickets for family, including 4 club seats on the 45 yard line.  I could have bought a small car with the annual donations alone.  

2 years later I think of all the money I wasted....    

[847badgerfan]

About 6-7 years ago I added it all up, and not including food, parking, fuel and hotels, I was spending close to $1K per game at Camp Randall. I did give more than required, so that would have eased it back a bit to about $350 per game, or so. That's for 2 people. If I were to include the stuff I excluded, we're right back close to $1K per game.


Man, the money I spent on this would look pretty good in the bank about now, but I digress. This went on for about 15 years, and for the first 10 years of those, I had 4 seats.


The money is not why I pulled out. 

[utee94]

In 2017, I dropped the season tickets I'd had since 1994.  I was spending roughly the same as you, for two tickets as well.

I'm now able to pick and choose a couple of games I want to attend in a season, and even the inflated prices on the secondary market for high-demand games, come in well below my previous spending.  And realistically, even if I bought tickets to EVERY game on the secondary market, I'd still come out way ahead, because tickets to Texas-Kansas are sold for far less than face value on the secondary market.  And I'm not making that big booster club donation every year, either.

I used to really love having the same tickets I'd had for decades, sitting among the same people, who had become my friends over the years even though I didn't know them before we ended up with neighboring seats.  Many of us eventually ended up tailgating together.  I attended some of their weddings, and some of them attended mine. I watched their kids grow up, and they watched mine.  

But the corporate pressures in the market place ultimately priced me out.  And so now neither I, nor my kids, regularly attend football games in Austin.

College football attendance was already declining, even before The Powers That Be decided corporate money was more important than creating new fans.  But you better believe the attendance numbers are going to decline even more sharply once my parents' generation dies off, and my generation continues to make the decision I finally made.  They're pricing out current fans, the milennials which constitute the current group of recent grads are far less interested in attending college football games than all previous generations, and they're not allowing people like me to create new fans by bringing along my children.

On our various forums, we've predicted for over a decade that the bubble would eventually collapse, and we're starting to see that occur.  It's only going to get worse.  Question is, will TPTB do anything positive to attempt to reverse the direction the sport is headed?

And the other question is, of course, will college football even be around in any meaningful form in two decades, for any of this to matter? 

[847badgerfan]

When I first started going to games, it was out of support for State U. The kids who are going now are going for the party. In Madison (one example), the student section is half-empty until about mid Q2. Then it empties out after Q3, when Jump Around is over.


This is the future. I hope nobody really believes that these kids will be buying tickets in 10 years.

[Entropy]

TV access has also changed things.   For many years growing up Nebraska was on TV more than most programs and even then, you'd either need to attend or listen on the radio for about 1/2 games in the season.  With every game on TV, the need to attend drops.   

[utee94]

TV access has also changed things.   For many years growing up Nebraska was on TV more than most programs and even then, you'd either need to attend or listen on the radio for about 1/2 games in the season.  With every game on TV, the need to attend drops.  

Absolutely.  One reason I'm comfortable releasing my season tickets, is because I know every single game will be televised. 

[Cincydawg]

https://www.onlineathens.com/sports/20180612/priority-point-level-to-buy-new-uga-football-season-tickets-zooms-to-new-record

It takes 23,900 priority points on top of the $275 per seat price tag for renewable season tickets, according to cutoff scores the school posted to its athletic website Tuesday evening.

A donor gets a priority point for every dollar given to the Hartman Fund for football season tickets, or a contribution to any other specific sport.

There is NO WAY I'm paying $25 large for tickets to 6-7 games per year, 2-3 of which will be UMass and their ilk.

I can Stubhub a LOT cheaper than that.

[SFBadger96]

Badge,

Part of the delay (part of it) in the student section is the method by which the students are allowed in. Madison was always a big party.

To Utee's point, one of the real shames of this is that these big money interests forcing people out also breaks down the community that built up around these games for decades. The breakdown of community is a real issue that impacts our national character. Seriously. This is just one tiny example of death by a thousand cuts, but membership in all kinds of community organizations and clubs is down throughout the nation--and a lot of money is made in all kinds of ways that threatens these organizations and the communities that form around them. This country has historically been rare, if not unique, in the strength of our community organizations, but we are losing it.

I'm not a bitter old man--this isn't a foregone conclusion, and there are lots of things that are better than ever--but this is something I worry about; and it is something that seems to be playing out in our national politics, too.