LINK: Dave Brandon discusses ticket prices w/ Central Student Government
I wish I wasn't so cynical when it comes to DB.
So, I read the article and half of me thinks "OK, it's good that he gets input from his customer".
But the other half of me reads the little lectures he gives to the students about Stubhub, and alcohol, and so on, and I think he is just going through the motions because it looks good . . . and he does not actually give a rat's ass about what the students think because he is smarter than them and his mind is made up anyway.
This article was really insulting to the students of the Univeristy. Brandon is basically saying that there are two Michigan's 1) kids who can afford to attend the games and deserve to be at the game and 2) the poors who don't deserve a seat.
When you tell students they should just go to a non-university ticket provider you are telling them the university has no interest in seeing them at the game. It may have just been the way Brandon was quoted, but he comes off as really condescending in the quotes provided.
Also is anyone really jonesing that hard for a $12 beer at Michigan stadium?
Man I had a really snarky comment about CSG and it took the life of me to not say it.
Glad to see they're attempting to do things that help the student body and make campus life better instead of focusing on other matters.
Man I had a really snarky comment about CSG and it took the life of me to not say it.
Glad to see they're attempting to do things that help the student body and make campus life better instead of focusing on other matters.
The argument that selling alcohol at the game would somehow benefit the health of alcoholics tailgating before attending the game is truly a work of art. I have no interest in increasing the amount of belligerent morons attending the games.
Brandon's point about the secondary market would have been a great retort last year with the general admission policy, but it's an irrelevant remark this year unless he's advocating that you ignore the assigned seating policy entirely. Pretty much no one is attending the game alone, and finding four or more tickets together for you and your friends is an impossible task in the ridiculous Facebook secondary market.
why complain about lack of alcohol sales because I doubt Brandon would offer happy hour prices to students.
DB: "So... I'm thinking of jacking up the ticket prices. That's cool, right?"
Student Gov: "Whatever. Our parents are paying for them anyhow."
I paid (am paying) for every bit of tuition, room, board, food and football tickets. I worked 20+ hours a week just so my student loans covered all my expenses plus a little fun. I'll be paying loans for the better part of the next decade.
So fuck off.
Yes there are a lot of well-off students at Michigan, but majority are not trust fund babies. I graduated from UM within four years and believe me, I have plenty of debt to show for it. My hunch is that you were never a student there or, if you were, lived under a complete rock so to remain totally oblivious to the fact that the student body represents a very wide range of economic backgrounds.
/end rant
Most people who's parents paid for their college are not "trust fund babies".
welp, obviously that joke did not perform well.
For the record, I was a student there, graduated in 2004.
It's generally believed that the "no-show problem" (ie students buying tickets but not actually attending the games) is due in part to students whose willingness to pay for tickets is much greater than their desire to actually use them. Obviously this is not the case for ALL students, but it does seem to be the case for enough of them to leave big chunks of the student section empty, both before and during the ill-concieved experiment with GA seating. The previous post was an attempt at humorous commentary on this phenomenom. It was not meant to offend.
Brandon provided suggestions for how students who cannot afford season tickets could acquire tickets if they want to. He said thousands of student tickets go unused every game, adding that students could easily acquire one of these tickets that go to waste for as little as $5.
Public Policy junior Carly Manes, an LSA representative, objected to Brandon’s reasoning. She said student ticket holders who decide to forgo the game can afford to sell the tickets to other students for a lower price. Manes added that this is often a last minute decision by the student not to attend.
Several representatives echoed Manes’ concerns and asked Brandon if he had any plans to implement programs for students with financial need. Brandon responded by saying students can go to StubHub to purchase cheaper tickets.
However, Brandon said students remain a priority for the Athletic Department. He said the multiple changes to ticketing policies reflect that.
Wow. I miss Bill Martin.
Would've been nice if someone replied to Brandon that tickets might sell for $5 because he has put together the worst slate of homes games in the (modern) history of Michigan football.
together the worst slate of homes games in the (modern) history of Michigan football.Utah: Pac12 team Miami(OH): crappy Minnesota: Bowl Team, game for the brown Jug Penn State: Decent team, new coach IU: Ok, I'll give you that one Maryland: Meh Could be worse, although I really wish Sparty were coming this year.
you only reinforce how bad he schedule is--not a single buzz-level game.
I don't know, the Hurricanes put on a pretty good show....
Oh wait...the other Miami...blah!
Yes. And Dave has suggested the same when discussing the possible OSU game move a while back. We are the only team in the B1G to get stuck with not just one, but two consecutive road games. On top of that, no other B1G team has to double up against a rival as we do at MSU.
When the schedules were reworked to allow for the entry of the most awesome programs ever (that's you, Rutgers and Maryland), without a doubt Brandon could have said, "Hold on fellas, we're kinda getting fucked here. I need to have a balanced schedule for the 115K people that fill Michigan Stadium."
Utah: Pac12 team (who has won 18 games over the last 3 years)
And you're forgetting our wonderful home opener
If we don't talk about our home opener it will just go away, right ?
Brandon responded by saying students can go to StubHub to purchase cheaper tickets.Or just get them off the street.
How much money does the AD make from student tickets anyway? They should be free, or at least dirt cheap. If there is concern over students getting tickets and not showing up, use ticket scans to keep track of who isn't going. If you don't go, your tickets get revoked and you lose the opportunity to buy them in the future.
I've always wondered why the hell students have to pay for tickets for our sporting evensWith how good our Athletic department is and how much money we make. Maybe not entirely free but something like $10 for a football game.
I think this tracking attendance idea would work and shouldnt be that difficult. In my opinion, they should just use an "opt-in" type system. You pay a fixed amount prior to the season that gives you the right to opt-in to home games (for no additional fee) during the week leading up to the game. This would be essentially be the same thing as paying for season tickets. You then have the ability to "claim" your ticket online up until some cut-off period before each game. For example, maybe you have until 12:00am the night before the game.
If you don't claim the ticket by then, you cannot attend (no refund). Any unclaimed tickets would then be assigned the upper-most seats in the student section (these seats wouldn't be general admission) and can then be resold by the university the morning of the game.
There would also be some penalty for claiming your ticket but failing to actually show up. For instance, if you claim your ticket and don't show up on two separate occasions, you lose your right to claim tickets for the rest of the season.
In my opinion this is an easy way to ensure that at least somebody will be using the tickets. this doesn't promote student-specific attendence directly, but you can reasonably envision such secondary effects:
the upper-tier seats in the student section are given away --> the students are more condensed in the remainder of the student section --> better atmosphere in the student section --> more students want to attend the game
21,000 * $295 (what I've heard the 2014 price for student tickets would be) = $6.195 million.
Turn those into free tickets and you've put the athletic department at risk of running at a loss.
I'd argue that a $6M investment in hooking future ticket purchasers and donaters over the next 50 years of their lives is more important than taking the upfront money. Especially for an athletic department that has revenues north of $150M a year. Surely they can find a way to adjust their expenses by 4%?
What I honestly wonder is if Brandon and others in the AD legitimately think that it's a change in students' interests/preferences that have resulted in the untimely and poor turnouts. If that's what they perceive the root of the problem to be, then they are way off track in resolving this issue, IMO. Sure students like to enjoy their time partying before games, but the tailgate scene is basically just like it's always been....Ann Arbor last season seemed exactly like it did prior to kickoffs as when I was a freshman back in 2006. So I sincerely hope the AD is not under the notion that students are just becoming more interested in pregaming. When you're trying to affect the behavior of huge crowds (~20,000 in case of the student section), it comes down to the amount of incentive (or disincentive) given to students to show up. Plain and simple.
On prices:
I assume most students think much like I did at the time - you purchase your tickets over the summer for whatever painstaking price they have been raised to but once the season rolls around you aren't feeling the pain of having dropped that few hundred dollars anymore. So for most games, students aren't going to even want to bother with the hassle of selling a ticket unless maybe they know 2+ weeks ahead of time they won't be going. I guess what I'm saying is that, generally speaking, students simply do not value their tickets as much as when they first buy them. This means they tend to be quite apathetic about trying to resell them meaning the supply on secondary market places (i.e. stubhub) is short of what it would be in an ideal market which of course causes the secondary market prices to be inflated. Accordingly, it's not that easy for less privileged students to simply "buy tickets on stubhub" for nice and cheap if they can't afford the package deal.
Assume though for the sake of it that DB sees this whole notion as justification to keep jacking up prices so students feel more compelled to attend games and on time...but that backfires and many students think the price is too much at the time and just don't bother buying tickets at all.
-Best action by AD: don't raise the goddamn prices on students. But if it HAS to be done, do so on a small, marginal basis so students don't discern the change in price to be a whole lot.
Or what's probably the most sure-fire solution: schedule better non conference opponents!! Shit. Sometimes the extra 20 or 30 minutes pregaming might be more appealing than being at your seat by 12 o'clock prompt so to not miss a second of what's sure to be a classic matchup against Delaware State.
Yeah apparently I just typed that all out on my phone to conclude what most others around here have - just schedule better games. There's not much of any other reasonable solution unless maybe they start selling alcohol at Michigan Stadium. Not only will that not happen, but Dave would ensure you pay no less than $10 for a can of extremely shitty beer anyway.
I just think Brandon has an unsustainable business practice but doesn't want to admit anything he does is wrong.
My uncle calls him PT Barnum Brandon, who as some of you may know is the person that said ''There's a sucker born every minute.''
I too made the PT Barnum comparison long ago. I think it was when he was flying around maize-and-blue wing-tipped planes during the "coaching search" of 2011 and then talked about how difficult it was to keep his whereabouts a secret.
The man is pathological.
I'm all for student tickets being $5.
However, it also means if you buy it for $5 then if you decide not to go its like 1 less beer at the bar. So it would be really easy for tickets to be abandoned and the seats left empty, given an outside force like cold and rainy weather.
So I see that the higher the cost, the more incentive the student has to at least try to recoup some of the value thru stubhub, the price auto-adjusting (in most cases) to what the market will bear. That puts someone in the seat.
But back to my top point. Here's my proposal. You buy in for the $250 or whatever, more or less 50% of the cost of other cheap end zone people like me, without the PSD. There's some kind of formula, you scan your ticket AND Student ID at the time of entry, the tracker software decides you are a regular attender, your cost goes DOWN for next school year. And so on, you attend more, you pay less. You attend less, you pay the same, the ceiling stays fixed. I'll let Lock Man and Dave drum up the algorithm or sorting logic with their best data gurus from there. And yes, Dave, you're going to have to give a discount to your best fans. Hunter will supply Kleenex to wipe up the tears. The nice thing is you give a little now, you're improving the odds that this continuing expenditure will be a priority post-graduation.
Oh yeah, and the students wanting to buy "Stadium Beer" is ironic. I drank some low cost beer in my student days that I wouldn't drink nowadays if it was free. Just saying students are cheeeep by necessity.
It would help if it was easier to transfer student tickets as well. BUT this might not matter anymore as it seems the demand for tickets for crappy games has reached it's max.
when I read his comment about painting the empty rows . . .
what a dream! have the $ for the seats, they do not get used, then sell adverrtising to be painted on the empty rows