RE: Making money off basketball
The Carrier Dome is a monstrous venue for basketball. Imagine if GT played basketball games in the Georgia Dome, they could have 10K show up and still be at 14% capacity.
For Duke, Syracuse had 35K show up, and the average for ACC games is about 24-25K. The dog games of early December averaged about 19K.
The question I have is the reason for the increase with Duke. Is it Duke fans travelling to Syracuse (I think not). It's probably fence sitting Syracuse fans that are intrigued by the matchup and therefore are more likely to show up in person than sit at home in front of an 80" HD TV.
I wonder what the real demand is for Syracuse basketball because size of the Dome prevents scarcity. Average demand is probably 27K or so. Not everyone can attend every game or sell or give away tickets if they buy season tickets.
When students are not in town, they are not in town. I know a lot of folks who have season tickets at WF, UNC, Duke, and NC State but will often avoid a 9:00 PM start time Sunday through Thursday night if they actually work and must show up the next day.
The same demand question could be asked of Duke, because Cameron is so small and scarcity is driven through the roof. If Duke had the Carrier Dome, how many would show up to watch their games? While Duke is nationally popular, their student population is small, and the number of alumni who remain in NC is nothing like NC State or UNC-Ch. Moreover, Duke would be competing against basketball ticket sales in it's own market against UNC-Ch, NC State, and the NHL.
One of the reasons Louisville does so well is that they are the only game in town and they have a good product. Those that have professional competition in their home market or have some a specific spatial situation are challenged.
For instance FSU is spatially challenged. As a State school you get in-state tuition as a Florida resident, however Tally is closer to Mobile Alabama and Columbus Georgia than it is to the population center of Florida. That's less an issue for a once a week football game on the weekend, but more problematic for a late night basketball game in the middle of the week.
Is a rabid VT fan located in DC or the Tidewater going to drive to Blacksburg for a weeknight basketball game - no. Just like Wake Forest and Duke alumni are not going to come in from the four corners of the continent more than once or twice a year.
My original point was that if you sell all your basketball tickets that you can sell, you will make more money. If you are going to look at basketball the same way some folks look at football and attempt to measure who is filling up their venue, you have to know the size of the venue as part of the formula and the size of the venue is not always in sync with the demand as with Duke and Syracuse basketball and with Clemson, Pitt, and Miami football.
Like Duke basketball, Memorial Stadium is smaller than demand, while some of that demand can be captured in a higher ticket price, you can't always raise ticket prices enough to capture all the demand. Miami and Pitt play in professionally sized stadiums because the available seating so outstrips demand. If football team X averages an attendance of 55K a year, is that good because the stadium only seats 55K, is it bad because the stadium seats 80K. If GT averages 55K, it's good. If FSU averages 55K, that's bad. But what should Pitt and Miami average? How do you know when the venue is so much larger than the demand?
To me that's the situation with the Carrier Dome and Syracuse basketball. While we know how many people showed up, we don't know if the attendance was great or just good, or below par.
None of this is a slam against Syracuse or it's fans. They have the most show up in the league. My point was more that 35K can show up, but the average that shows up is just 24K - if that represent unsold tickets, that represents potential missed revenue.
NC State had an average attendance 3500 below capacity, UNC was 2-2.5K below capacity on average.
The reason this is of interest to me is that UNC is pondering building a new venue that will have less total seats, but will have luxury boxes and perks more like what NC State plays in with the thought being that scarcity will drive up the demand and they can go up on the amount required to get tickets.
Sort of like if Clemson took 15,000 seats of out of Memorial. Louisville is actively considering adding seats to their football stadium and NC State folks talk about adding to Carter-Finley. However I don't know that you can expand seats in today's media environment if you have any real competition in the same sports in your home market.
What happens when holographic tv comes to pass and you can feel like you are on the playing surface. Will folks still come to the game in person?
Anyway, I think to take umbrage at calling the Carrier Dome "big" when talking about basketball is akin to taking umbrage from a woman that you have a large ***** - most males would take it as a compliment. At least I think they would.
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