Comparing B1G Football Season Ticket Prices: A Comprehensive Overview

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e.bigelow said:
Best case scenario, we keep 4 tickets in 103 with a $1,000 donation on top of the price by 2017. Worst case, We go down to two tickets or none at all and just choose the games we wish to attend on the secondary market and spend my hard earned cash elsewhere. That latter would pain me greatly as I love my alma mater & Gopher Football dearly, but I have other expenses/vacations/recreational activities that I can see spending my money on.
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I hear you. That's exactly the bind we loyalists are being put in. Pony up, or scale back. I think Norwood's miscalculation was that more would scale back than pony up. I would love to jump up to 4 tix from my 2, but it won't happen now. I would also love to pony up and give the U all the money it needs to build the facilities they need. Unfortunately, I'm just a middle-class alumnus, not some corporate bigwig.

I also sympathize on the travel issue. I drive 5 hours to escape Wisconsin and watch my beloved Gophers in person. Sometimes I crash with friends, other times hotel it. Looks like I'll be imposing on friends more in the coming years.
 

RailBaronYarr said:
Disagree. We sit in 237, row 23 (pretty high up). They're the last section with chairbacks but did not require a donation. I recognize we were getting a pretty nice deal by paying the same as the folks one section to our right for a marginally better view and certainly better comfort (I was in 236 a couple years back and bought the padded seat backs - the move was definitely welcome and ended up saving money by not paying $40/seat). My point being, these seats are OK but not great. They're on the 3 yard line, quite high up. No, there are no bad seats in TCF, but outside the student section these are in the bottom half IMHO.

With that said, our tickets this year cost $330 each (plus the handling fee). By 2017, that jumps to $580 (plus whatever mystery handling amount). That's a 75% increase in 3 years. Keep in mind they increased our prices this year by $55 coming into this year (they were $275 in 2013, I have the myGophersports account log to prove it), so it's not like they've kept things flat since 2009. That makes for a 110% increase in a 4 year span. That's a 4-year CAGR of 20.6%. Even if you dig back to 2009 (where ticket prices held flat for several years, to be fair), that's a 9.8% averaged annual growth rate.

Things that haven't grown that fast since 2009:

- My salary
- Inflation (CPI or the government index)
- US GDP
- My 401k
- Total athlete scholarship cost increases (acc. to the Gopher site 09/10 - 14/15 is 2.15% CAGR)
- Tuition cost increases (acc. to the Gopher site 09/10 - 15/16 is 3.22% CAGR)
- Pent-up demand for season tickets to Gopher Football games (waiting list is still 0, to my knowledge), existing STHs have remained basically flat (to falling in the student section)
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Well played :clap:
 

vinko bogataj said:
Agreed. Here is how the math works out using the nine schools cited in the article above for my family to buy seats in a comparative section (with apologies for the crude editing from excel):

Gopher Ticket Price Comparison and Rankings for similar seats

Seat Location: Chairbacks in Section 137.

School BaseTicket Donation Total Variance Avg@7Gm Variance PerGameCost for 4
Nebraska $392.00 $1,000.00 $1,392.00 $797.33 $198.86 $163.29 $795.43
Minnesota $310.00 $500.00 $810.00 $215.33 $115.71 $30.76 $462.86
Michigan $455.00 $350.00 $805.00 $210.33 $115.00 $30.05 $460.00 **
Penn State $355.00 $100.00 $455.00 $(139.67) $65.00 $(19.95) $260.00
Iowa $395.00 $50.00 $445.00 $(149.67) $63.57 $(21.38) $254.29
Wisconsin $315.00 $100.00 $415.00 $(179.67) $59.29 $(25.67) $237.14
MichiganSt $308.00 $100.00 $408.00 $(186.67) $58.29 $(26.67) $233.14
Purdue $273.00 $100.00 $373.00 $(221.67) $53.29 $(31.67) $213.14
N'western $249.00 $- $249.00 $(345.67) $35.57 $(49.38) $142.29
Averages: $339.11 $255.56 $594.67 $84.95 $339.81

We now know that this pricing model puts Minnesota near the top of the Big Ten in per ticket price by 2017, and some of the schools learned that hard way (Michigan, Iowa) that getting greedy the last few years has caught up to them and there probably cannot be huge increases for those schools in the next three years.

Our peers, being in a large metro area with other options, are UCLA, Pittsburgh, Boston College, Miami, Arizona State, Georgia Tech, and Washington. I have not yet had a chance to review the base ticket prices and donation levels for those schools, but I bet the new Norwood plan far exceeds anything done at those schools. I suspect many of those schools are paying less than we are today and the 2017 numbers Norwood is shoving down our throats dwarfs anything being done.

UW in Seattle might be the exception, so I think I'll start there.
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