(09-03-2013 10:01 PM)HMK Wrote: (09-03-2013 09:48 PM)olddawg Wrote: (09-03-2013 09:26 PM)HMK Wrote: (09-02-2013 12:29 PM)olddawg Wrote: per Stoss tweet- it's $300,000. Pretty good deal for playing a winnable game.
Stoss didn't mention this but it has been mentioned in other articles- some MAC schools use part of their huge Big 10 paydays to subsidize payment for guarantee FCS games. They have to pay BEYOND what their home games generate in order to get teams to play there w/o a return game.
Let's face it, they averaged 9300 per game last year. At their ticket prices that doesn't even cover their game guarantee for us. Robbing from Peter to pay Paul doesn't seem like a sound business model.
We use the same business model to pay CCSU and St. Francis from the 300,000 we get from Akron.
Doesn't seem the same to me. We can actually afford to pay those teams solely from money generated by the individual game and still turn a profit on said game. Akron can't- they don't generate enough from their games to break even ( after paying for a guarantee game) and have to use their payday money.
How much do we make per game this year? Remember we have 7 games and the season ticket price is the same as it was for 6 games. We employ 700 people on game day.
Well, that's a good question, what a home game makes us - one that I wished the DNR would have asked when we submitted our playoff bid in 2011. Back then, the school made it sound like our overhead was severe ( to the point where it completely negated our 10,000 new seats.) I didn't really buy it but haven't heard a peep about it since.
This year is a bit of an abberation w/ the additional ( and free 7th game). I'm sure any season in the future where we might have 7 home games, the season ticket price will be adjusted accordingly. So based on a usual 6 game home slate, I have in my head that 8000 tickets were allotted for students and roughly 8000 season tickets had been sold. Now there's many ways to pigeon hole the student ticket allotment by our bean counters. Let's just leave them out for the sake of discussion. If we do have 8k season tickets sold and we average, say 23k per game, that leaves 7000 partial season tickets/ walkups/ advance individual game sales /discounted & promo tix/ whatever.
Too time consuming for me to figure how many tickets are sold at what level. Some season tix are more $ than others. All the individual game tix are 27 bucks or more. If the tickets averaged out to 20 bucks per ticket, that's about $300,000 per game ( $20 x 15,000 people). Guarantees from us to smaller FCS programs are 50-100k. That still leaves us with a lot of money even after paying those 700 employees and still turn on the lights & water. If it doesn't, then we have made a grievous error in how we run our stadium operations. And I have to think some of those 700 are salaried university employees who happen to be scheduled for a Saturday rather than a Wednesday. In any case, the theory should be the more support staff needed, the more money we're generating. I also would like to think that if we had a game that we truly felt would draw less our usual attendance( like a playoff game), that we could scale down our gameday operations. It can be done.
And any of these admittedly rough calculations don't take into consideration money made from Stadium store items, concession food & drink , stadium advertising etc.