When we look back a couple of decades now and wonder what happened to live attendance at college football games, don’t undersell the ability of athletic departments to sabotage themselves by crapping all over potential ticket buyers.
If you’re planning on going to the Texas/USC game this fall, be prepared to buy tickets for UT’s home contests against Tulsa, TCU, Baylor, West Virginia and Iowa State as well.
Texas announced on Tuesday that single-game tickets for UT’s home game against USC on Sept. 15 will not be made available. Tickets sold through Texas will only be doled out to season ticket holders.
Such a deal. Should be a good investment for the canny season ticket holder, who can grab the tickets and make a few extra bucks selling them on the secondary market to the same folks the school brushed aside. Assuming they still want to go, that is.
The spirit of Steve Patterson lives on in Austin.
Get The Picture 
Same plan that Tech uses in odd numbered years.
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Except that Tech has so few season ticket holders in the first place that would buy the “extras” for the UGA game. The truth is the school itself will sell the extras on the secondary. Same as what Texas will do here with the USC game. Not hard to figure out. Keep this in mind the next time you read a news story that blames scalpers and bots for there being no tickets for sale. It is a farce.
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Give GT some credit. Usually, the three-packs included a no-name game when Georgia wasn’t playing at home and a Thursday night game that GT usually lost in some excruciating fashion.
We would give the no-name tickets away to some acquaintance with kids and would show up Thursday night after work in Georgia gear for what was often a very entertaining evening.
And the free hotdogs and the free cokes. Not a bad deal.
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That may work in the short-run but it’s not a good strategy to use over the long-haul. You end up w/ smaller crowds as the Senator mentioned & a shrinking fan base.
I’ve already got 3 games my seats will be empty this season – Austin Peay, Mid TN St & UMass. I may tailgate but I highly doubt I’ll waste my time watching those games.
Thanks McG for thinking of the fans & giving us good games to watch.
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I’ll gladly take the tickets to one of the games that is a day game…
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You going to at least pay him face value? You can even ignore the donation portion of the cost.
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You said it was a waste of time…I am sure the tickets will be basically free…I’ll pass on your counter. Thanks.
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You seem to be getting me confused with atlasshrugged55. Pay more attention to who posts each comment.
In any case, if the tickets indeed “will be basically free” as you claim (and I don’t disagree), then a hell of a lot of people have determined that “it was a waste of time”. And this actually includes you, as you aren’t even willing to pay face value (forgetting about the donation cost).
Thanks for proving my point!
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How many seats?
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It wouldn’t surprise me if AD Greg didn’t try something like this next year with the Irish coming to town. He has to make ends meet ya know.
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You’re assuming that we won’t sell enough season tickets next year to the point that we’ll have extra Notre Dame tickets available beyond their allotment? I highly doubt that.
That’s what surprises me about the UT thing. They ought to be fired up about a still-new regime with potential.
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Exactly…and UT used the right process to hire their Coach and everything…
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Would there have been single game tickets to this contest anyway? If Texas is like UGA and looking at their athletic budget I’d say yes points and season ticket holders will have all of the seats tied up anyway so the point in this case is moot. The underlying theme of athletic department greed is still very valid though.
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It’s rotten. And it’s a cheap trick.
Sell the cupcake tickets on their own merit. Give them away to HS football programs (when I played HS ball, the whole team got tickets to GT’s cupcake games..the stands had lots of other HS teams sitting together). Let people in for free…they might buy some concessions..etc. You’ll grow some good will.
Then learn a lesson..there is a great demand for quality products.
In the old days when the Braves could only draw a few thousand for night games, I always thought of how much smarter it would be to just open the gates for the bleachers.
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they practically did….$2.00 outfield seats and wait until the 4th inning and sit in the best seats in the house……and as long as the beer in your cooler was in plastic milk jugs(which mine was) you drank cheap too. Giving Bob Horner crap was very entertaining.
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The shocker here is that Texas has such a small season ticket base…
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Sounds like a UGA vs. LSU ticket tactic to me. What athletic departments force us to do to pay for price increases. i.e. sell those on the secondary market.
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Isn’t this exactly what UGA does? It’s called a season ticket. This year you have to buy tickets to the Austin Peay, Middle Tennessee, Tennessee, Vanderbilt, UMass, and Georgia Tech games in order to get tickets to the Auburn game.
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Or save $2500 and just buy the Auburn ticket alone and get the rest for $20.
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You can buy it on the secondary market. Unless the visiting team doesn’t sell its allotment, it’s the only way to buy a single direct from UGA.
That assumes season tickets sell out … which they always have.
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I’m telling you, not long from now you are going to see a greater revolt when it comes to season tickets and getting folks to attend games against cupcakes. More and more people have had enough with the headaches when it comes to price, traffic, getting to/from the stadium, a ton of non-action thanks to all the TV timeouts/commercials, and everything else that has become more of a hassle as of late.
Two friends of mine in the Atlanta area who were season ticket holders for 15+ years recently threw in the towel, and they decided to instead relax at home while going the stubhub route for 1-2 games yearly for the bigger games. They certainly can’t be the only ones who are at least thinking about ditching season tickets and staying at home instead.
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Been doing that for 15 years. And the tickets are getting so much worse. In 2012 the SEC Championship was a play in and I bought one for $150. 5 years later it has tripled.
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Absolutely. It’s already started across the country. UGA is experiencing a reprieve from having to deal with it due to the success of the team last year. Even if they continue winning (and even win a national championship in the coming years), they’ll eventually have to deal with it like everyone else.
It’s all downhill from here. And when you factor in the gradual decline in the popularity of the sport that is coming, it will be even worse.
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I personally feel CB will continue to grow in popularity, however the growth will come from eyeballs on TV sets, not fans in the stands. As you mentioned UGA is in good shape for the coming years due to success, and all those transient fans living in Atlanta will latch on as UGA continues to be a major player. But when UGA suffers the next dip, certainly those pains will come.
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Yep..listen to it on the radio while you golf or fish. It will change. There has to be a lot of schools in the country that would love to play UGA….that don’t happen to have frosting on them.
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Done done it!!
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Yall should see what upper tier G5 teams do with tickets. They have clearly hired the best consultants in the ticketing business, as it’s the most elaborate song and dance I have ever seen. Knowing they won’t ever sell out, they impose (what appears IMO) to be extremely orchestrated timeline to basically disguise the glut of supply— both in the sheer number of tickets and the availability of certain locations. At one point, as a prospective new season ticket holder, i noticed that the only available seats for purchase THROUGH THE SCHOOL (spit out by an algorithm on the last page of the purchase screen) were the exact same tickets as the only available tickets ON STUBHUB.
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