Back in the heat of college football realignment talk last July, Alford shared a Fox Sports graphic which ranked FSU 14th among the most valuable college football programs at $96 million. Among non-SEC or Big Ten programs, FSU tied for second with Oregon behind only Notre Dame.
Last November, Alford showed the FSU Board of Trustees a graphic while addressing them that put the FSU brand into perspective with the best programs in the SEC and Big Ten. While FSU and the ACC have a much smaller television contract relative to those conferences, Alford’s research showed that FSU matches up well if you pull out the television revenue that schools get from their conference.
Using each athletic department’s 2019 revenue numbers if television revenue were not factored in, FSU athletics’ $111.8 million would rank third in both the SEC (behind Texas A&M and Georgia) and the Big Ten (behind Ohio State and Michigan). FSU’s 2019 revenue mark without television factored in was well above the average for SEC schools ($94.5 million) and Big Ten schools ($86 million).
Suffice it to say, that wasn’t the best period of success in FSU football’s history. And yet still, FSU was doing better television numbers than a lot of teams having more success, including one which won a pair of national titles in that span.
That FSU was still the most-watched ACC team even through its most extended period of struggles since the 1970s shows FSU’s lasting value as a brand. However, football performance is still important with realignment capable of popping up once again at any moment.
That makes FSU’s 10-3 2022 record, far and away the Seminoles’ best football season since 2016, critically important. It shows that FSU isn’t just a college football brand relying on success from decades ago to stay relevant like Nebraska, but that FSU can be great once more.
With FSU and Clemson representing 24% of the ACC’s media value at the moment according to Alford, it’s clear the role that football success has in today’s age of college athletes.
“That's the one driving the eyeballs. Right or wrong, when you look at what ESPN or any media agreement values, they're going to look at TV viewership, they’re going to look at TV households, they're gonna look at football performance and they're gonna look at basketball performance. That's what they pay you for,” Alford said. “Right or wrong, that is how they break down what it is and what the media distribution is and what the media TV contract is. That's why it's so important to keep those brands relevant across the country, not only at Florida State but amongst the ACC. We talk about it internally all the time that we need to constantly look at our marquee brands within our own conference and how do we showcase those more…
“(FSU and Clemson) are the marquee brands within this conference and have been across this timeframe so we need to make sure those two brands are being out in the forefront.”
https://floridastate.rivals.com/news/column-as-fsu-football-ascends-athletics-juggles-complex-issues
By Florida law, public institutions cannot use taxpayer money to fund athletics, including athletics facilities. The FSU athletics department must operate on a balanced budget, supplemented by Seminole Booster annual donations (typically about $17 million each year). The state of Florida also prohibits the university from funding facilities, so FSU athletics looks to Seminole Boosters to raise the money to build its facilities and to make payments on existing facility debt (about $10 million) each year.
The Seminole Boosters annual fund currently has just over 13,000 members who donate $70 to $25,000 per year to an unrestricted fund, which the athletics director can use to fund any aspect of the athletics budget. Those Booster members receive a variety of benefits, including ticket priority for season tickets, and why Booster revenues rise and fall with how many tickets Seminole fans buy. Booster membership has ranged from a high of 19,000 members to less than 10,000 in recent years. The Boosters also raise money exclusively for capital projects (facilities) and scholarship endowments as well as operate revenue-generating enterprises.
https://floridastate.forums.rivals.com/threads/fsu-not-committed-to-football.343883/
According to our AD Michael Alford: "when you look at the history, we went back and looked at 10 years of making a commitment to that program.
We were dead last in the ACC in terms of our percentage of commitment to football. That’s not Florida State. You look back and say, “OK, why are we in the position we are in?” And look at the analytics of it. That’s one of the reasons. There were a lot of other reasons, but one of them was we hadn’t made that commitment to that sport".
Jerry Kutz
Yes. It will need to be a story, not a post. I have a great deal of faith in Michael Alford so I want to clarify what he meant in those quotes referenced. My experience from 2000 to 2019 was that FSU invested the vast majority of any money it generated by ticket sales or raised by fundraising in football so I'll need to ask him more about the quantitative analysis.
Here's the cliff notes on what I experienced.
Part 1: Alford mentioned other factors. One was money to invest.
Alford will tell you that ticket sales and annual fund contributions tied to those ticket sales generate the vast amount of the revenue an athletic director needs to commit to any sport. And I think what he meant by "other factors" was this:
FSU enjoyed only one sold out season in those 10 years (2014) and seven of the worst years in ticket sales history, including two Covid-affected seasons.
By my quick calculation, FSU had $70-$130 million less to invest than it could have had if they had normal sales of 30k to 40k season tickets. And the absence of that revenue will put any grand plans the department has on hold.
Let me remind you why tickets sales went down: Many FSU fans boycotted ticket sales at the end of the Bowden era, so ticket sales fell from 42k to 20k and the Booster contributions tied to those tickets fell with them. A reduction of 22k tickets at $330 each is $7.26 million per year and the loss of annual booster money tied to those seats is another $7 million. Add it up and you've got $14.26 million less to invest EVERY year.
FSU sold 30k in 2013, sold 40k in 2014 and gradually fell back to 20k by 2018. 2019 was a Covid bust. 2020 and 2021 were covid affected at 20k.By way of reference,
Seminole fans bought just over 28k season tickets for this past 2022 season, which one would think would grow over 30k on the heels of a 10-win season and the team coming back.And, least we forget, the previous AD also had to pay Taggart's buy out.
All of those factors played into how much money FSU had to invest. Hopefully, ticket sales and Booster contributions will rise to the level they need to be for Alford to be able to make the necessary investments.
Part 2: At least $150 million was spent on football projects alone
In spite of a reduction in ticket revenue and annual contributions,
Seminole Boosters' capital campaigns raised a lot of money for football projects -- more than $125 million -- built football facilities, including: the Indoor Practice Facility ($20m), the practice fields ($5 m), $10m on rebuilding the locker rooms and coaches suites (twice in 10 years), the weight room, the players lounge, another $20m on mandated Doak Campbell structural renovations and coating, $60m to build the champions club, which pays for the structural renovations and coating and generates ongoing revenue for athletics and $15 million on scoreboards and ribbon boards.Yes, there were projects built for other sports, but none of them were the magnitude of football.
During the Jimbo era, FSU greatly expanded the size of the football staff, coaches salaries, recruiting budget, etc from what it had been but not like what football staffs have today.
Part 3: Others were investing too
During those years, we saw the ACC investing money in their football programs in order to catchup to what Florida State had built the decade before and in some cases leapfrog Florida State. That was the ACC's decade of growth as they needed to expand their football stadiums, build skyboxes and club seats and get caught up on football facilities. So, it would not surprise me if they spent more in that decade than did Florida State..
I think the one facility they built that FSU has yet to build, was the football operations building. They leap frogged Florida State in terms of football operations buildings during that time as they replaced antiquated facilities.
Again, this is more suited to a story than a post but here's a condensed answer.
The ticket prices were always pretty comparable. What was not equal was the contribution requirement to maintain seats in various sections of the stadium.
FSU's donation requirement was 25 percent of what the average SEC and ACC school were requiring section by section. Even after FSU approved two increases over the next 10 years, FSU"s policy hadn't reached 50 percent of what ACC and SEC schools were requiring for contribution. The last policy increase FSU did was 2018, right before I retired from the Boosters, so they are overdue for another adjustment. Alford and I talked about it yesterday that donors prefer smaller, more-frequent increases than sudden, larger increases. He knows most schools he's been at do it routinely every three to five years. By my count, FSU has adjusted the policy three times in 22 years so it's time.Here's a longer answer with details:
We did extensive SMA studies and focus groups before the athletic director and athletic board would approve the increases as demand for seats in Doak are traditionally soft (more on that later) so our first increase in 25 years was surgical. We increased the contribution requirement in Priority 1 more (highest demand) by slightly more than what we increased the requirement in Priority 2. We also had a Priority 3 area, which had no contribution requirement, which was very unusual among schools.
Each time FSU had an increase, we generated more revenue but we also lost a portion of our local season ticket base who felt we priced them out of Doak. This was a real concern going in as the household income in Leon County was $40-45,000 and surrounded by seven of the poorest counties in the state. We found very few people who didn't want to pay the extra contribution were willing to move to a lower priority area.
I haven't done an SMA study since 2015, when we did the planning for the Champions Club, but I'm certain FSU faces the same supply/demand/location challenges today that make increasing the contribution requirement challenging.
- household incomes in the Big Bend area are largely set by state salaries and haven't increased proportionally
- where UF, Clemson, Auburn draw from more than 10 million people within 150-mile drive, Tallahassee drew from less than 1 million (now 2 mil). I studied every stadium. Alabama is about the only campus I could find that didn't have 8-10 million people within a three hour drive, and Tuscaloosa has almost 6 milion, three times what FSU draws from.
- because 70 percent of our ticket base lives more than 3 hours from Tallahassee, there is a tremendous dependence on hotel rooms and frankly there aren't many in Tallahassee or in surrounding communities, therefore the price of those hotels and the two-night minimums became a real cost of tickets to our out-of-town fans
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Coach Bowden felt the need to have an 80k seat stadium in order to compete for recruits with SEC schools and FSU has not been able to consistently fill it. FSU started "right sizing" the stadium with the Champions Club, which reduced capacity from 83k to 78k. The changes Alford proposed and FSU is selling would take Doak down to 65k, which is what it needs to be given hotels, roads, parking and demand.- Television has been another huge factor. You old folks will remember the day when if you wanted to see FSU play, you had to come to Doak as televised games were rare. Now they are all televised and most of our fans prefer to stay home and watch it on television. It's a profound paradigm change.
What FSU and its fan base can do right now is look ahead so as to capitalize on an improved football team by
getting the season football ticket base back to 40,000 and to get its Seminole Booster donor base back to 19,000, which it was in the 1990s. This administration, and this generation of Seminole fans, can do it because it has been done before.
FSU currently has less than 30,000 season ticket holders and 13,000 Seminole Booster members. FSU fans have been waiting to see the product get better and now that it has, the focus should turn to how to sell out Doak and hit the Boosters stated goal of 20,000 members. Do that and FSU adds $10m dollars to the athletics budget it doesn't have right now.
