Lo and behold, Greg Sankey actually said something thoughtful yesterday ($$).
On Wednesday, the words of a statistician Sankey met with via video conference earlier this week felt especially wise. “Her observation was ‘For the really big decisions, wait as long as you can. Because if you think about what we knew 30 days ago compared to today, you’re going to know much more than that by comparison 30 days from now,’ ” Sankey said. “So we’re all in this information gathering/learning experience that is uncertain, but if we can understand there will be answers like ‘I don’t know’ that maybe have to linger. We’re going to deal with that discomfort. But we’re going to have to do the job of preparing to provide the real answers at the right time.”
We simply don’t know enough right now to make the momentous decisions about bringing back college football with any certainty about the consequences. Will we know more in a month? Who’s to say, but it’s damned certain the decision makers won’t know less.
Which leaves us Georgia fans in the same boat.
Season ticket holder Brian Sugrue, also from Peachtree Corners, said there’s “no way” he would go to games in the current situation, but renewed his tickets in large part to ensure “holding our place basically.”
That was also a motivation for McKemie.
“I have confidence that we will be back in the stadium in some point in the future and I wanted to hold onto my tickets,” he said.
Sugrue runs the Georgia fan blog Dawgsonline.com and his Twitter profile was updated for these times to includes a photo of Uga with a face mask.
He and his wife have two pair of lower level tickets that they didn’t want to risk losing—two on the 50-yard line and two in the east end zone that Sugrue likes also because of the familiar fans that surround him there.
“We’re assuming there are certain things that will happen by the time they decide to hold games,” said Sugrue, a 46-year old software developer who became a season ticket holder in 1996 and his wife since the late 1980s. “We definitely have apprehension about going unless some pretty specific conditions are met.”
Knowing that a refund would be coming if the season was cancelled “eases the decision a little bit. The only hard part would be if they decided to hold games and we still weren’t comfortable with 90,000 random people.”
Georgia fans like McKemie and Sugrue now have the months ahead to see what a Bulldogs football season might look like in 2020.
“It looks like a tough call right now,” McKemie said. “It’s easy to see this going into early or mid-June before the disease is no longer a concern for anyone. I believe there’s a reasonably good chance it will impact the season in some way. …Decisions will be made to continue it in some form or fashion. I’m game for whatever they can come up with that keeps it going.”
If there’s one thing you can say about Dawgnation, it’s that we’ve long known patience is a virtue.
Get The Picture 
If people don’t renew, I hopefully get to improve my seats. I paid it all up front before the original deadline, so if there was a decision to issue every 2nd or 3rd seat, I would at least have an argument with the ticket office about getting seats.
Who am I kidding? If there’s a limitation on seating, the Magill people are going to get them. I’m fully prepared to have my seats end up in the 600 level for this year.
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I don’t think there are any renewable seats in the 600 level. If you paid your Hartman Fund donation, you’ll get seats at least as good as what you had last year.
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That assumes that the AA doesn’t reduce capacity to address social distancing concerns. If the AA is required to reduce capacity by only selling every other seat or every 3rd seat to achieve social distancing guidelines for 2020, there will be people with renewable seats that won’t receive seats (or the number ordered). Others will be relocated temporarily, and I bet the AA uses all of this to move Magill members into better seats for the 2020 season.
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I’m as much of a skeptic as anyone when it comes to the AA – but I don’t see them taking away renewable seats. The marginal difference in financial liability between having a game with 30k fans and one with 90k fans is zero – either way the downside leads to BK if something goes wrong. If it is safe to bring in 30k fans, it is safe tor bring in 90k+ tailgaters/downtown Athens revelers.
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I tend to agree, but if this is the only way they can have fans in the stands and collect the ticket revenue (even it’s only a portion), the AA is going to do it.
If this happens, it will (hopefully) be only a 1 year issue.
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I’m with ryan on this. If it isn’t safe for 90k+ to attend, they’re not going to let 30k attend. I guess I could see them possibly letting a really small number of high up Magillites attend in that situation. Maybe.
But if they’re playing games (with or without any fans), that means the students are back on campus going to school. And that’s totally up in the air at this point. I’m expecting they’ll determine by Memorial Day whether the students can return for fall semester.
With that said, even if the students are back, mass gatherings at professional and semi-professional (i.e. college) sporting events may still be on hold. My guess (and I posted this the other day) is that those aren’t coming back until either a) a vaccine is widely available and used OR b) natural immunity builds up over time. And neither of those is likely in the 2020 calendar year.
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I would assume you are probably correct … I guess that means I’ll have other things to do on Saturdays, watch some highlights, and read the Senator’s Observations from the Armchair analysis.
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Good point. If that’s going to happen tho, seems like the decision would have to be made soon, before the online seat selection, which the ticket office says has to happen during May.
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Starting this year there ARE renewable seats in the 600 level. Bottom half of Sections 604-610; $275 donation per seat. That was part of the plan to pull back ~2,000 visitor tickets. So your per game seat cost works out to ~$115. Wow.
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Was told by the ticket office that paying my renewal “in full” before the 4/6 deadline was necessary to allow participation in the May seat selection process. Then, after doing so and finding out they were allowing people to have payment extended until end of May, I asked how those particular seats would be handled if not actually paid for – given the seat selection process would have been already completed. The paraphrased answer from Tim Cearley:
Persons who made “arrangements” for delayed payments will not be considered to have released their seats, so those seats will not be available in the May seat selection process.
The ticket office will be following up via letter and phone between 4/6-4/20 with ALL remaining patrons who did not renew or contact the ticket office before the deadline to make “arrangements”. This is to ensure they truly intended to not renew. If they renew through that follow-up process, their seats will be protected. So, effectively the 2020 renewal deadline was not 4/6, but 4/20.
Only those seats remaining after completion of #2 above will be available in the May seat selection process. For any in #1 that are not eventually paid, they will go back into “inventory” for the 2021 seat selection process.
So, the reward for dutifully renewing on time, every year, for 40 years is once again to be screwed.
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It’s hard to argue with the sentiment that sports shouldn’t exactly be in the vanguard of re-opening. Don’t need a statistician to tell you that.
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The reason the Butts-Mehre Country Club gave for not extending their order deadline more than 6 days was that they could only absorb minimal delay to their seat relocation process in May.
I guess Texas has their act together more than the BMCC because they pushed their deadlines back and their seat relocation process will be late June-July…
https://texassports.com/news/2020/3/16/2020-texas-football-season-ticket-renewal-deadline-extended-to-friday-may-1.aspx
This news brief has been brought to you by The Georgia Way. The Georgia Way…we’re not just a country club, we’re a quasi-charity. No really, we are. Look, it doesn’t matter if our Personal Seat Licenses…I mean, donations…are no longer tax deductible. We still think we’re kind of a charity. Ok? Are you listening?
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This line from the B-H piece also bugs me:
“Georgia is still working with donors who have not yet renewed.”
What does that mean, exactly? A lot of us did whatever we needed to do to get the $$$ in before the deadlines. So is the ticket office allowing deadlines to be extended, for some people? Doesn’t seem fair, to those of us who followed the rules the AA had already set out.
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The country club does whatever it wants. After all, they’re just a simple quasi-charity. They’re definitely not a business pretending to be a quasi-charity.
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UGA AA in en email told us that if paying for tickets by the deadline is a hardship contact the AA and it would defer payment or set up a payment plan. The donor had to do 2 things. 1. Send in a season ticket order no later than April 1st. 2. Contact the AA about alternative payment arrangements.
I did both. UGA AA has my order and is setting my tickets aside for me, and I agreed to pay for the tickets by May 31st.
That option was available for everyone.
The folks who sent in their renewal order and money before the middle of March would not have gotten the email before paying. This is anecdotal, but I am aware that there is at least one donor who sent in payment and now is hurting due to the shelter in place. That donor contacted the AA and it agreed to refund the order with the agreement he would pay for his/her tickets by a certain date.
I recommend that you contact the UGA AA and see if it will do the same for you.
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They had already said, prior to the April 6 deadline, that they would allow a delayed payment as long as the season ticket holder placed their renewal order by April 6. That season ticket holder just wouldn’t be able to go through the seat relocation process (the process that, for some reason, couldn’t be pushed back like at Texas).
So why are we now in mid-April with them still “working” with people who haven’t renewed?
I think that was chop’s point.
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Fair enuf, Gaskill, sorry, didn’t mean to throw off on anyone who took advantage of that deferred payment offer. I seriously considered it myself, but I really want to try and improve my seat location, so I want to go thru the online selection
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You didn’t have to pay for season ticket renewals yet if you responded to the email they sent out about it. They extended the date to pay by until the end of May. They just processed your renewal with a balance still due that has to be paid up by May 31st.
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See my post on this a few spots above. The response I received was directly from Tim Cearley. They are individually following up with those who did not renew and by doing so have effectively extended the renewal process from 4/6 to 4/20 without penalty. As I said there, most of us who followed the rules for the potential opportunity of a location improvement were screwed.
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I’d agree with the country club sentiment but at least a country club values its members more than an annual deck of playing cards or cell phone fan.
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Good point, Ryan
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What? You didn’t find those fans helpful in the blazing heat of those early noontime games??? Color me shocked.
I’ll be surprised if the AA makes wholesale refunds. Gotta keep those reserve funds intact. Look for an “airline points” like strategy in regards to seats. If you allow the AA to hold on to all your money, they will hold your seats and parking intact for the 2021 season, giving you double “points” towards next year or towards any other ticketed future athletic event (i.e. basketball). Redeemable points may or may not result in improved seating or parking for those events.
Also of note, would student fees still provide for student tickets? Can you charge the same if half of classes are computer remote? Lots of $$$ to think about.
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They have already asked if you want any ticket refunds applied to your 2021 Hartman contribution. I said no.
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They’ve already said they’ll offer both donation and ticket refunds.
But they might offer some kind of alternative incentive like you describe. They don’t care about inflation in their points scheme, as evidenced by their Magill Society 2-for-1 and 1.5-for-1 promotions.
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Bluto….for all your wit, wisdom plus snarkery, this may be one of your better confessions about DawgNation, top 5 (at least from my chair) “it’s that we’ve long known patience is a virtue.”
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I’ve renewed my seat on the couch.
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