I forgot I had this little tidbit bookmarked until Brian Cook mentioned it yesterday.
The Alabama board of trustees on Friday approved Phase I of the athletics facilities rebuild starting with Bryant-Denny Stadium…
The meeting and interview with Byrne shed more light on unanswered questions surrounding the project officially announced Aug. 16. A few answers:
— The new capacity of Bryant-Denny Stadium will be “a hair under 100,000,” Byrne said. It currently seats 101,821.
— What happens to the fans displaced in the upper deck when the video board replaces a big chunk of the 8,500 bleacher seats? “Most of those are student seats in the upper deck,” Byrne said. “Right now, we’re going through the process of contacting fans who are impacted by this and getting their input on what their first, second and third choices are as part of the relocation.”
— Five percent of ticket holders will be impacted by the renovation.
Folks, when even Alabama commits to shrinking stadium capacity, it’s time to acknowledge we’re likely past the canary in the coal mine phase. We’re seeing college football embarking on corporatization of the product. Asses in the seats are being replaced by premium features and pricing.
It’s been nice knowing you, five percent of ticket holders.
Get The Picture 
Stub Hub will like this.
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I get the decision to reduce seating to allow for additional premium seating. My question will be how will they decide what season ticket holders will lose their privileges or how many students will lose access to tickets while still paying the full athletic fee.
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If they do things like UGA does, I would assume low man on the priority totem pole would be ass-out. As far as the student tickets, no idea.
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I’m thinking they’ll cut back student tickets just enough to handle this slight reduction.
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2ndly, our scoreboard/video board has them intimidated.
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Yeah, Kirby’s on the mutha! 🙂
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I was going to make a comment about personal seat licenses but then I remembered Hartman Fund contributions, or whatever it is you people have to donate to for the privilege of buying season tickets.
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I remember sitting on the tracks in the early 70’s watching the Dawgs. Man how times have changed. College football is slowly losing its soul. Things are getting more corporate by the day. I’m feeling kinda sad and nostalgic.
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Wait, so we’re saying that Georgia Tech was ahead of the curve on this?
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Fewer asses in seats? At Georgia Tech, we can do that!
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First off, we are talking about a 1.5 – 2% reduction in seats, so let’s not act like Bama is slashing capacity down to 67K so they can rip out all bleachers and install extra wide, plush individual seats instead, complete with two new club levels. Second, this trend is happening not because of some new corporatization of the product, but because more and more fans (like me) are choosing to stay home and not go through all the hassles and cost of a typical game day experience.
I recently bought a Samsung 75 inch HDTV for $1300, and 55 inch TVs can be had these days for less than $600. Everyone in my circle of friends has either given up season tickets or chosen to attend fewer games due to the convenience of watching games at home on a big TV, complete with all the creature comforts (perfect weather, no traffic, no restroom lines, food/beer, perfect view of the action, no overweight slob taking up half your seat, etc.)
When large CFB stadiums start looking like NFL ones, then I’ll cede that corporations are taking over. Until then, I’ll continue to chalk it up to fans choosing to stay home instead of giving up an entire day of their time to watch a 55-7 game against Autin Peay or MTSU.
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Whatever blows your skirt up, man.
Alabama isn’t responding to a crisis of fans staying home like you are. They are anticipating what’s coming.
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I suspect UA has figured out that they can make more money selling suites than they can seats. As long as TV money keeps paying the bills, the typical one butt, one seat, one hotdog, one coke fan is going to keep getting the nasty end of the stick. We don’t have to like it……..
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But part of the convenience and cost savings of staying home is the result of athletic departments chasing dollars. Like you, I gave up my season tickets. But part of the reason was because the bathrooms were dirty, concession lines were stupidly slow, costs were rising, and nobody has been able to figure out how to move people in and out of Athens on gamedays.
If McGarity spent 1/10th the energy on fans that he has on recruits, some of the inconvenience and cost could be alleviated. Instead, we get happy face/sad face boxes near concession stands while recruits watch in the lap of luxury.
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I think the point is more subtle.
Have you been to a super bowl? If so you quickly realize that it’s not about the fans of the teams. It’s a circle jerk of celebs and the famous and the well-heeled showing off that they got the cheese to get in.
The problem is that once entrance is limited to a few it HAS to become about something OTHER than the game. The folks in those suites and club level seats aren’t better fans. They’re hobnobbing, politicking, and networking and going to $2,000 parties.
The reason people are choosing to stay home has less to do with big TVs and comfy seats and more to do with it being a $1000 weekend if you have to stay overnight.
It’s becoming unattainable for regular folk so make it about something else and keep the money flowing.
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Bingo
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Two games a year outfits a man cave in spectacular fashion. For season tickets, you can add a plush patio set up with some killer grills.
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You are right, it isn’t about corporatization at all, and they can take much more than 5% of the seats back. Fan attendance issues are just beginning to show up in the South, but it will escalate. It will take a while to look like the West Coast stadiums, but cracks have been showing more and more. It isn’t just the 30K seats unoccupied seats at Neyland during a horrid stretch of football for them, Auburn and LSU didn’t sell out for a game at JH with two unbeaten, ranked teams. That jolted even me, and I have seen this coming for many years. There are many issues involved from the hassle factor, to TV exposure and scheduling, but the biggest blow is the generational change over as older fans who grew up with the railroad tracks and fun times phase out and there will be no one for one replacement by the apathetic, whiny Millennials. Traditions are dying fast, and not in a good way. The amount of money required is a factor, but not the primary driver, imo.
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Yeah and I may have misheard it, I didn’t rewind and listen again, but I swear the announcers during our game said a number lower than it was previously in regards to capacity before and after that construction they’re doing in Mizzou. P
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Yeah, I heard that too. Mizzou is cutting capacity.
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You didn’t mishear. “Stadium capacity will decrease from just over 71,000 to around 65,000. However, school officials project a net revenue increase from new ‘premium’ options, according to the report.”
https://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/mizzou-football/look-mizzou-approves-98-million-football-stadium-renovation/
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Where have you gone, railroad track crowd?
Our lonely nation turns its eyes to you…
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Yep. The rail road track crowd or their modern day counterparts have been made aware in no uncertain terms that they are an embarrassment and not wanted or needed. The fan base looks a lot
different than it did even twenty years ago.
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D.A.C. was prophetic…
“The old man was covered with tattoos and scars…”
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There’s some that comment here that have let their disdain for the less well to do portions of the fan base slip a time or two.
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When a senior in High School, my buddies and I sat on the tracks for every home game. Talk about some hell raising. I’ll just say none of us could be confirmed for the Supreme Court, and leave it at that. Mixing a bunch of drunk GA fans with thousands of pieces of gravel is not a good thing. Good times.
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Me yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAncUrPPXao
(Not for the rapey stuff by the way. Just the black out drunk stuff.)
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Oh, I’d bet you would get onto the Supreme Court given what we’re witnessing now…
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I sat on the tracks for every game during my time in Athens. Erk sometimes joined us late on Friday nights to smoke a cigar and enjoy a brew. That’s right, we often stayed up there all night. Different times, no doubt.
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I remember those Fridays. We would usually be out drinking in Augusta and when the bars closed about 2, someone would say: “lets drive to Athens and get a good seat on the tracks”. So we would load up the coolers and get there about 5 AM. It helped being 18, if I tried that now it would kill me.
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Did you go to MCG?
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Every time some jackass talks about the “redneck” portion of our fan base, which as far as I can tell means anyone who doesn’t live in Atlanta and makes less than 100k a year, I think to myself, “Yeah our legendary DC used to drink beer with those fans and called them “my people”. College football has been marching toward being something only rich people can afford to enjoy live and in UGA’s case that’s who is welcome to the exclusion of everyone else.
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As a moderately reformed former broke ass redneck, I endorse this message. I may have moved up, but I’m not forgetting from where I came. This may become most clear after a full day of jack and cokes at the tailgate.
Ain’t nothing finer in the land…
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JG, I attended MCG later in life. I grew up in Augusta and was in high school when me and my rowdy band of delinquents made our nocturnal trips to the tracks.
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You’ve previously mentioned being a physician and then the reference to Augusta made me wonder.
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Yep, went to medical at MCG. I had matured ( a little) by then.
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“Medical school” – damn
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You do know 5% of a small percentage of the total fans who follow you is not much, right?
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I would look at it the other way–5% of the tiny percentage of the total fans that bother to come out to the games and support the team in person is a lot.
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Fewer students attending could trend to fewer future young alumni attending which could result in fewer future older alumni attending, etc., etc. Just saying.
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The sad thing is, it’s already happening. Athletic departments are noticing that young alumni aren’t ordering season tickets like they were in years past. And their answer to that is to chase more TV/sponsor dollars to make up the difference. It works great in the short term. In the long term, colleges will be replacing stadium seats with green screens.
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Anyone notice all the high end condos going up in the iconic downtowns of university towns? And the ages of people buying and living in them?
Makes sense. You’re usually near great medical facilities, and you can walk to all sorts of concerts, talks, and games. Great restaurants. Surrounded by young people! Never feel old!
We’re turning college towns into retirement communities. They are going to milk that generation for everything they can.
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I’m guessing they lost a recruit who liked Auburn’s video board.
Also, Alabama’s had issues getting students to attend their games, so much that they introduced penalties to students who don’t use their tickets.
No doubt it’s the student seats being reduced.
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The 3 options the fans have been given are: 1 donate more money for different seats, 2 donate the same amount of money and buy tickets on the aftermarket, and 3 become auburn fans.
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Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
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Just make sure that the poor folks are trapped on the bottom deck while you’re doing it.
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Look for a gradual change in how road tickets are handled as part of the eventual solution. I believe UGA has 6 of 7 games this year with several thousand returned tickets each from visiting teams – and are still trying to sell those. And have you gotten a look at the upper decks of supposed “sold out” games? Schools will re-balance in part by eliminating ~50% of the visitor allotments as contracts are renewed, push the lower level visitor seats to nose-bleed and free up those seats for larger contributions, and leave the residual visiting fans to look to 3rd party sellers. If someone expects me to pay $100-125 for a visitor seat in the top rows at SC, AU, UT, etc., I’d prefer to pick my seat on the 3rd party market.
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The other question we need to be asking is how McGarity & Co. are planning to wring more cash out of us next year with Notre Dame, A&M, SC, UK, and Mizzou coming to Athens. Let’s face it, he’ll see it as an opportunity to ask whatever he wants and we’ll accept it.
With any perceived tax benefits for Hartman contributions a thing of the past, will UGAA chance asking for more from that source, or simply raise the face value of tickets again? Will there be a “premium Power 5” surcharge for some games? Whatever the source, I fully expect to be asked to pony up more. They’ve got to squeeze out some of us with lower level sideline seats to satisfy the demand from Magill contributors we are blocking each time we renew. Would be curious to hear other thoughts on how you see this playing out.
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Good questions. My wild ass guess is that donation requirements will stay the same for 2019 but ticket prices to power 5 games will go up $15-20 (and prices to non-power 5 games will stay the same). But some of it may depend on how the rest of this year goes.
It will be interesting to see how things go over the next few years. I take it year-by-year and I’m ready to stop donating whenever. That 2020 home schedule looks like another complete dud like this year.
Your move Butts-Mehre.
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I think this has less to do with “corporatization”, as you call it and more to do with keeping up with the Barn. Apparently, Bama has video board envy!
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Sadly, after 25 years as a season ticket holder in Sanford I’m feeling more and more like that 5% of unwanted and displaced fans. I’ve not physically been moved from my seats yet, but I’ve felt a whole lot of nudging and pushing from our administration. Just as the Dawgs are having their best days in the sun, too. Feel like Rodney Dangerfield, I tell ya! There are other factors of life involved, too – kids getting older, too many competing activities and commitments for time and money – but I’ve stubbornly resisted changing my donor/ticket holder status so far. But the economics of spending a bunch on secondary market tickets to attend the best games, and watching the rest on TV, all the while saving money overall – – my blind and stupid loyalty is starting to feel just that, with no excuses. It sucks getting older and wiser.
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I heard Tennessee was going to remove a bunch of seats and install luxury mobile homes to make their fans feel more at home during the game.
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