https://floridastate.forums.rivals.com/threads/2019-football-season-ticket-packet.245656/page-2#post-4148588
No. If the price of the season ticket is now $380 you will pay $1520 for the four season tickets plus the same minimum donation requirement for those seats in section 33, so its a relatively minor price increase to help us fund the budget.
Your donation requirement in that section was $500 per seat or $2000 for the four seats and that hasn't changed.
Stadiums around the country are trying to price location to market in order to sell all their seats. When you look at our stubhub sales you will see our market is like many, where some seats are in very high demand and others are not.
In order to fill Doak we'd like to be able to price the lower demand seats closer to market, which means lowering the price to as low as $199 with a minimum Booster contribution. Last year, there was very little difference between our lowest and highest demand sections, so this adjustment corrects that and maybe allows a family of four to be able to attend a home game.
The policy also slightly increases the price of the highest demand season tickets which generates additional revenue for the athletics budget.
Ken,
What he is posting about is the communication to those people who will be affected.
Have you received your renewal notice, which recently were mailed?
As you noted, the previous change two years ago was to go to a variable per seat minimum contribution requirement by section. Rather than just priority 1 and priority 2, we now have a more graduated scale based on how many seats you buy. That has not changed.
This change is to the actual price of a season ticket in the highest and lowest demand sections to bring the price closer to market.
While we are increasing the highest demand seats slightly, we are also lowering the price of the lowest demand seats in an effort to price them to market and sell out Doak. We want to price sections in Doak to where a family of four can afford to attend the live event.
The goal is to fund athletics while still keeping attending a live event affordable to our market.
Call or email me if you have questions or post them here for others to see.
The comfort of your actual seat is a function of two measurements: the width of the seat and the distance between your row and the row in front of you.
It is relatively easy to change the width of the seat -- average 17 inches -- by reducing the number of people on a row. I'll get back to that...
But it is impossible to change the distance between rows - 26 inches - without replacing all the seating decks which we hope to do within the next 10 years.
Changing just the width of the seat from 17 to say 20 inches will help but if you are tall, your knees will still be straddling the person in front of you (until such time as we can replace all the plates so there is 30 or more inches between rows).
We are considering doing just the width component in various sections but when you reduce the number of people on a row, it can displace people. Typically, when a stadium does something major like this, they have to do a total stadium re-seat which would be disruptive to some of our season ticket holders. I think our fans would be okay with a reseat if it was accompanied by a truly more comfortable experience. We are testing it but were not 100 percent sure our fans would perceive "a more comfortable experience" with just a wider seat. We're not sure we can achieve that until we can also increase the distance between the rows from 26-30 inches, which will require a major renovation of Doak (in the $250 million range) to do it right.
We have preliminary design done.
I'm just fretting about money - football floats the boat.
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My revenue estimates are guesses but if you compare cumulative attendance in 2014-15 to 2018-19 and assume $50 a ticket FSU received $4.9M less ticket revenue. But of course that's squiffy math and does not take into account booster donations and student tickets.
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I wish I had a fix.
It is both a Title 1X issue and a budget issue.
Title IX does relate with your male/female student population. We male's have always appreciated the fact that FSU has a lot more females than males but when it comes to collegiate competition, having more women than men is not a good thing for men (but I am not complaining).
To work toward compliance, FSU needed to add more opportunities for women or drop a men's sport to balance the equation. We added sand volleyball which helped.
If we added a men's sport, whether soccer or LAX, it would throw the equation further out of whack so I don't see us adding any men's sports before women's sports. And for that reason, I don't see us adding a women's sport any time soon.
Plus, there is the matter of revenue necessary to fund those sports which generate no revenue. Whatever you add will make it that much tougher to balance the budget which would have a debilitating effect on the existing 20 sports including football.
Clemson dropped four sports a couple years ago (men's and women's swimming and diving) so they could fund their remaining 16 sports at a higher level, especially football. They added women's softball this year to be up to 17 sports compared to FSU with 20 sports.
I agree men's soccer and men's lacrosse are very popular sports and growing in popularity faster than football. We could one day find soccer and LAX are revenue generating sports (see Atlanta professional soccer) but not yet.
We have both sports at FSU on a club level and they are very competitive against the colleges with whom they compete.
As for the fledgling ACC Network
I don't think any of us know enough about that to comment accurately in terms of how much it will generate. I do believe even if its $5 million a year, its a windfall and can grow so I'm all for it.
What I would venture to say is that the ACC Network revenue will be the same for FSU whether we are great in a sport or not. The reason I say that is the Network will fill the air whether with us or with an ACC team that is winning and attractive (think current TV and NCAA revenue distribution which is equal for all teams regardless of record) so I don't think that is driving our thought process currently. Our biggest opportunity for additional revenue from basketball will still be home attendance and that will be driven by fan experience as much as team performance.
I don't think any of us know enough about that to comment accurately in terms of how much it will generate. I do believe even if its $5 million a year, its a windfall and can grow so I'm all for it.
What I would venture to say is that the ACC Network revenue will be the same for FSU whether we are great in a sport or not. The reason I say that is the Network will fill the air whether with us or with an ACC team that is winning and attractive (think current TV and NCAA revenue distribution which is equal for all teams regardless of record) so I don't think that is driving our thought process currently. Our biggest opportunity for additional revenue from basketball will still be home attendance and that will be driven by fan experience as much as team performance.
Couple of points I'd like to clarify.
First, university endowments have little to do with athletics at most public universities. When a donor donates money to an endowment, it is typically earmarked for a department and can only be spent to benefit that department. A gift to nursing can only be used for nursing. A gift to athletics, can only be used for athletics. Furthermore, a gift to soccer, can only be used for soccer.
The FSU Athletics Scholarship Endowment, started in 1985, is growing and is currently at about $70 million. Forget about the $700 million in the university endowment. All that counts is the $70 mil for athletics. I believe the same is true at most public universities so the fact UF has $1.6 Billion doesn't affect their athletics program directly either.
If the $70 million scholarship endowment earns 5 percent annually, that is $3.5 million of earnings that can be used to fund a part of the $11 million annual cost of scholarships.
BTW... very few athletic departments have fully funded scholarship endowments. That is a misnomer. I don't have the numbers in front of me but it is not the norm.
Some schools had major gifts to build facilities -- like a Ben Hill Griffin Stadium or Williams Brice Stadium -- so they have less debt on those facilities than Seminole Boosters has to pay on all the facilities we've built with debt since the 1990s. We carry about $10 million in debt service we have to pay each year to pay the bond issues on Doak expansion since the 1990s, Howser, softball/soccer, track etc. Most athletic departments (or direct support organizations like Seminole Boosters) are carrying debt with donor pledges against that debt but maybe not quite as much as FSU.
Second, USA Today reports the NCAA's financial data each year which showed FSU was ranked 8th in spending last year and 14th in revenue generated by athletics and athletic contributions (Seminole Boosters) so when people say "we don't have money", I ask compared to who?
Our budget was over $110 million which was larger than any other ACC school. There were only seven schools in the nation whose athletic budget was greater than FSU and some of those schools have 25 to 30 sports compared to our 20 sports.
While we don't generate the level of money as 13 other schools, like Texas and Texas AM and Florida, we generate more than most every opponent we play.
While I agree with JMGNole that we are relatively young in terms of endowments and the funding of facilities, I would add the following current sources of income:
1. The ACC Network currently generates $15 million less per team, per year than SEC, BIG, Big12 and Pac12 teams receive from their network contracts. Hopefully when the ACC network fully launches this August, it will close the gap. If only by $5 million, it would help. But remember, in spite of the huge difference in network revenues, FSU was still 8th in spending last year and 14th in revenues which is pretty amazing when you think about it.
2. Population, or lack thereof, within 150 miles of the FSU campus has a very detrimental effect on revenue. I've written it ad nauseum but FSU has less than 1 million people within a 150 miles compared to 8-10 million the same distance from cowtowns like Gainesville, Auburn or Clemson. I haven't found a 70,000 seat stadium, east of the Mississippi River, with less than FSU. Heck, other than maybe Penn State, I can't find anyone with less than 5 million. And that has a very detrimental effect on all ticket sales, contributions associated with ticket sales, corporate spending, etc. I am talking about $5 to 10 million a year type of affect.
In the SWOT analysis location is one of, if not the, greatest weakness. We are way more vulnerable to downturns in season ticket sales, time of kickoff or midweek tip, with 1 million people around us, than are other schools who have 8-10 million people who can drive in and out on gameday.
YET, in spite of 1. and 2. above, FSU was still 14th in revenue generated and 8th in spending so keep that in perspective.
We ain't broke and we're funding our teams at levels where they are winning national championships and finishing in the top 10 in the Directors Cup. The one sport that has unfortunately struggled the past few years, football, has a larger budget than most anyone they play and the No. 2 recruiting budget in the nation.
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