Maturi said U is meeting about improving student section at football games

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"I believe the bill that was passed by the state to build the stadium requires 10,000 tickets allotted to the students. If they wanted to sell tickets that weren't purchased by the students to new alumni or the general public, they'd have to wait until the week before the game. "


If Maximus was right, they have to figure out a way to sell those 10,000 tickets without extending the privilege to the "I used to be a student not to long ago" people. One would also hope that scalping them to the General Public will not be a solution. People on this board are mostly Gopher fans. Even here, the sentiment to "just sell them to Badger or Iowa fans" isn't beyond the realm of possibility.

Only having to deal with 6-8,000 Badger fans last year was the only dam saving grace about that game.

They also need to come up with something a little more timely then "just win 9 or 10 games." They need to sell them before this season begins. That apparently, isn't as obvious as one would think.
 

It's true that if the Gophers are winning the student section will be fuller. But that can't be the only solution, we need a solution that will keep the student section full even when it isn't one of our best years. I'd be willing to give up the revenue from student tickets, the PR value of a full student section is of more value than the revenues from student tickets.

It's important to get the tickets into the hands of the students who most want to go. If they are in the hands of students who will only go if the team is going really well, the student section will be empty quite often. Getting student groups involved somehow is important. Free admission for students is a possibility, on a first come-first served basis - once the seats are all taken, students would be turned away. Or incentives like refunds at the end of the season if you use your tickets.
 

1. make the tickets and id's scan-able.
2. at the end of the year collect all the names of the students who did not miss a single game
3. award 1 of them, via a random drawing, with a semester's tuition paid in full
 

MrGopher said:
1. make the tickets and id's scan-able.
2. at the end of the year collect all the names of the students who did not miss a single game
3. award 1 of them, via a random drawing, with a semester's tuition paid in full
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Any way to tell if that student stayed for the whole game? Or actually used it themselves?
 

Maverick said:
Any way to tell if that student stayed for the whole game? Or actually used it themselves?
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Both would likely require the tickets to be on the student's ID (a la Penn State). The ID would get scanned on the way in obviously (so you'd see who is using their tickets). You'd have to do the same on the way out if you wanted to see if a student stayed all game (which really isn't realistic).
 


GoAUpher said:
Both would likely require the tickets to be on the student's ID (a la Penn State). The ID would get scanned on the way in obviously (so you'd see who is using their tickets). You'd have to do the same on the way out if you wanted to see if a student stayed all game (which really isn't realistic).
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Are you telling me that the person doing the scanning would be verifying that the scanned ID and the person handing it to them would be the same?
 

I don't know how to get students to stay for the whole game, but that seems like a general problem with minnesota fans, not just students.

As far as the "used it themselves" part, we just need to get on the athletic department about telling their employees to truly check names to faces. And double check for people wearing yellow and black, and breathalyzer the ones wearing red.
 

Maverick said:
Are you telling me that the person doing the scanning would be verifying that the scanned ID and the person handing it to them would be the same?
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That's what PSU is doing (or claims to be doing...who knows if they're actually comparing the ID's). My understanding is there was still a ticket marketplace where the tickets could get transferred to another student's ID but I could be wrong about that.

Not saying this is way to go, just saying it seems like the best approach if you wanted to accomplish the goal of knowing who went to each game not just who picked up tickets.
 

There has been a lot of good ideas posted here. I've used some of them in my stab at a plan:

1. Oversell student section by around 20%.
2. Increase prices modestly for student season tickets.
3. Beginning on the Thursday before the first game, tickets are opened up on a first come basis to individual student game tickets, and youth group sales.
4. Raise the price of the individual student game tickets by 25 - 50% to encourage the sale of season tickets.
5. Sell group youth tickets at $10 ticket, which includes a gold t-shirt. Marketing covers any cost overruns. Targeted groups would be middle and high school football programs, youth football clubs, and neighborhood rec centers like Boys and Girls Club and YMCA etc.
6. Groups need to arrive together and enter the stadium where and when they can get a short tour of the football facilities. The idea is to pay special attention to future Gopher fans, students and players.
 



Ok, here's my 2 cents on the Student Section, from a 2009 Grad.

1. I think a lot of students bought season tickets this past year are not big football fans but wanted to be at "the" event of the first game, and probably the badger game. For them $70 was a fair price for just those two events. They basically bought two $35 tickets (and a bonus t-shirt) with the option to go to more games if they feel like it.

2. Related to #1, students are on a scale of gopher football fan-ness. Some students like gopher football, but they have other things that are more important. Students have jobs, class projects, meetings, trips, and family events that might trump going to a football game.

3. The Student Section is General Admission benches. Students cram together to sit in the best seats possible. The dome had seats which kept it more orderly, the bank has benches and you can easily fit more people in fewer spaces. Why sit comfortably in the very top corner if you can cram together a little for a lot better seats? Also all empty seats are lumped together in the worst locations, instead of spread out in groups of 2 or 4, like in the general seating.

4. Some students find selling their tickets a hassle. A lot of students will just eat the $5 they might get from selling their gopher/SDSU instead of wasting the time to find a buyer and then meeting them somewhere.

5. Some students use football games as an excuse to drink heavily and don't really care if they make it to the game or not. Some students would consider missing only 1 game due to passing out in someone's front yard a good season.

Taking those into consideration, it's easy to see how it's not 100% full for all of the games. As the U rediscovers on-campus football, the student support will grow, but it won't happen overnight, and could take a few years, and a few more key-victories.

A quick fix might be to re-evaluate the width of the seats in the student section and see if they can increase the capacity slightly allowing more tickets to be sold and a more full looking section.

Another thing they could do is put the tickets on the U-cards, and then require to students to go online and reserve their tickets each week, say by Wednesday. Tickets that are not reserved are put up for sale online for students who are non-season ticket holders. Of course this probably wouldn't help for the games against "boring" teams, or ones at 11am since those tickets wouldn't sell well.
 

I second everything Farmgopher just wrote.

I also think that high school aged kids and recent U grads are prime markets for 'surplus' ticket sales. It's a way to get potential students familiar with campus and its culture. Also it would be a good way to give something back to those folks who helped fund the stadium's construction.
 

One more thing I thought of after a night's rest is that people are saying that raising the cost of student tickets would make the problem worse, but that's not true. The student section sold out with season tickets. That means that the demand was greater than the supply, and the section was technically sold out for every game.

From the Ticket office's standpoint they hit a home run, they sold out every game, and they didn't have to deal with a sold out crowd of students. The problem is that the tickets aren't being used by the students that purchased them, mostly for the reason's I listed above. Increasing the cost of the tickets would actually increase their value and make it harder not to go to the games. If you had to pay $150 for season tickets, each game you missed would seem a lot more costly.

One other option would be to charge, say $300 for student tickets and for every game you went to $25 would be added back to your U account. Then students would feel more obligated to go to the game, or sell the tickets to another student, to avoid losing the extra $25.

Since we're throwing out ideas, I have another one. Using U-cards and "computers", the U could monitor what games the students went to and when they got there. They could use that information to promote going to the more "boring" games by reserving the lower level of the student section for exciting games like the badger/hawkeye games for students who showed up before kickoff for the games against boring teams (NE Tech U State).

These two ideas don't solve the leaving early problem, but that's more of an on the field issue that will hopefully soon be addressed.

GO GOPHERS!
 

The cheaper tickets are, the more likely they are to be purchased. However, if they are cheap, they are more likely to be purchased by disinterested people. Imagine it is widgets instead of tickets. The widgets are so cheap that people buy them without having much use for them. So they sit in the garage. Others with more interest can't use them, but because they are so cheap, it's not worth the time or effort on the part of the people who have them to get them into the hands of others who might want them.

If we scan the tickets, so we also record which tickets are used and which are not? If we do that is very valuable information. We could have contests among the frats and other student organizations for who can get the most of their members to attend Gopher games., and award prizes. I believe that incentives are the real key. Some negative, like if you're not there by the second quarter, others will be let in, and you might not get a seat. And a whole lot of positive incentives. Take all that revenue from student tickets and put it into a fund for incentives.
 



smaller seat numbers

The student section has WAY too much room between seats. If you go to a game at Michigan, the seat number 1 and seat number 2 are pretty damn close together.

You can sell 10,000 student seats but move the seat numbers closer together. They just stand anyway. You then make room for another 3,000 seats that are sold to the general public as season tickets.

The student section stays at 10,000 but the overall attendance goes up by 3,000.

Right now, even if all 10,000 students showed up they could cram into the space of about 7,000 seats.

I was told the seats are really spread out in order to make seat back chairs at some point in the distant future. Not necessary if you ask me.
 

Students don't need chairbacks, their backs are strong. Besides, how would they work with general admission, unless all the seat had them? I agree shave a few inches off the width of the alloted seating area in the student section, the students are on average a lot less wide than the people sitting in the regular seating area.
 

The idea students don't show up because they have other things to do makes me laugh. That is simply an excuse and nothing but an excuse. Do you think that the other 40,000 who show up every week don't have other obligations they could be attending to? I can think of a lot of things I could and should be doing with my time on Saturday afternoons, but I find a way to get to every home game and to watch every road game.
 

SMU GOPHS FAN said:
The idea students don't show up because they have other things to do makes me laugh. That is simply an excuse and nothing but an excuse. Do you think that the other 40,000 who show up every week don't have other obligations they could be attending to? I can think of a lot of things I could and should be doing with my time on Saturday afternoons, but I find a way to get to every home game and to watch every road game.
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Dude, most people have more than one thing they should/could/would like to do at any given time. Its about priorities. Some people's priorities are different from your own. For better or worse, Gopher sports usually trumps other activities for most of us on this board. However most people, especially students, do not share the general disposition of us on this board---that gopher sports are an extremely high priority.
 

MrGopher said:
Dude, most people have more than one thing they should/could/would like to do at any given time. Its about priorities. Some people's priorities are different from your own. For better or worse, Gopher sports usually trumps other activities for most of us on this board. However most people, especially students, do not share the general disposition of us on this board---that gopher sports are an extremely high priority.
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Season ticket holders generally consider sports a fairly high priority.
 

Schnauzer said:
If I hear the "need a better product" comment again I believe my head may spin off of my shoulders and explode. What is it about a .500 football team that deserves an empty stadium? If people really believe a "better product" is needed, does the team really need to go 10-2 or better every year to fill the student section? Or, if "better product" just means a bit better, how can that make such a huge difference when an awesome new stadium with a .500 team resulted in FEWER students than similar records in the dome, off of campus?

As someone else stated so well, the team was looking very good heading into the Wisconsin game this past fall and that game against the biggest rival was played out before a lot of empty seats.

Anyway you stack it, the "better product" argument takes a back seat well behind many other REAL factors that are keeping the students away from the games.
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Exactly!
 

RodentRampage said:
Season ticket holders generally consider sports a fairly high priority.
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Typically I'd say yes. But last season many of the student ticket holders didn't buy them because they were big sports fans. They bought them for the novelty of the new stadium, to say they were there for the first game. And at a cost of $70 it is easy for those students to be comfortable letting their tickets languish if they decided it was too cold or that there was something they'd rather be doing.

That's what the U has to figure out. How to discourage that type of fan from snatching up too many seats or how to hold them accountable for being extremely fair weather.
 

RodentRampage said:
Season ticket holders generally consider sports a fairly high priority.
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When I attended my first Gopher games, I certainly didn't consider it a priority. I bought season tickets because they were (and still are) dirt cheap. I didn't go to all the games.

Then Maroney and Barber came along, and the Michigan game (among other heartbreakers), and eventually I needed to be there every game I could. In those days, the stadium wasn't half as full as it was in 2009. Give these kids something to get fired up about and Saturdays at the stadium will move up the priority list.
 

RodentRampage said:
Season ticket holders generally consider sports a fairly high priority.
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That's why there were plenty of games where the regular season ticket holder seats were fairly empty? We've had this argument before a million times. I'm not backing the students for NOT coming since IMO it's as important to support your team whether winning or losing and I don't think there was a single game we played at home this year where we didn't have a very good chance of winning coming in to it. BUT take a look at the open seats in the season ticket holder areas at the WI, Purdue, SDSU games. It wasn't just students - it is only magnified there because they can all pack down, allowing large chunks of open space in the bleachers.
 

MrGopher said:
1. make the tickets and id's scan-able.
2. at the end of the year collect all the names of the students who did not miss a single game
3. award 1 of them, via a random drawing, with a semester's tuition paid in full
Click to expand...

Did you get this from Tennessee women's basketball?
 

RodentRampage said:
Season ticket holders generally consider sports a fairly high priority.
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Student season ticket holders don't. It's just like "Student athlete." Student should come first.

I also agree that there were a lot of students who got tickets because it was the first game in the stadium. A few of my friends who hadn't purchased tickets before bought them for this reason.
 


RodentRampage said:
A potential problem with student tickets that are too cheap is that students who have only marginal interest in football will get them if the cost is nominal. These students won't bother to show up.
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The thing is, and this is the real elephant in the room, 99% of the student body at Minnesota has, at best, a "marginal interest" in the football team.

These mythical hardcore student/fans that are clammoring for tickets simply don't exist. People talk about how easy it should be to fill that section with a 40,000 student body, but the metro area alone has a population of about 3.5 million people, and there are plenty of Minnesota sporting events with empty seats.
 

REALITY

The metro has alot of activities to choose from. Just in sports, there is the Twins, Vikings, Timberwolves, Wild and other Gopher Sports to spend ones money on. Further, the Gopher football team has been medicore at best for 40+ years. I don't think it is too hard to figure out why there are empty seats at Gopher football games. Its not like Madison or Iowa City where there is only one game in town and further, both of those schools football programs have been winning for along time. Bottom line-the competition is fierce for the sports dollar in the Twin City metro area and Gopher football has been avg at best and terrible at worst for many many years-guess where the emty seats are going to be?! It will change if we ever win but I doubt it will ever be like Madison or Iowa City-there is to much to choose from in the Twin Cities. In any case, I think Gopher football fans that do attend games are either the greatest of all for how long they have suffered or just plain stubborn and dumb.
 

Both interest and disinteret are contagious. A lot of people bought season tickets just to see the opening game, and lost interest. Those students will be less likely to renew, so the 2010 ticketholders may be be inclined to actually attend. Students will attend if they percieve the game as an "event". The more full the student section is, the more of an event is appears to be. I think it will be better this year, but I favor incentives to get people to use their tickets, or at least make sure they get used.
 

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