It's not necessarily about the quantity of seats we're adding; it's more about the revenue that those seats generate.
Sure, we could have put in bleachers all the way up and had our stadium seat around 70,000 or so, but that's not at all what we needed. Hell, we couldn't fill that anyway. We did, however, have a huge demand for premium seating. Multiple sold out club levels puts way more money in our pockets than a 3/4 full bleacher section.
Exactly
Approx revenue generation/yr(just in tickets and BDC donations):
Scoreboard Club - $1.75 million
The State Level(skyboxes) - $1.1 million
The State Level(loge) - $0.8 million
The Gridiron Club - $0.56 million(worth noting that this is not permanent seating)
Endzone general seating which is about +4800 overall general seats(assuming a total price of $600/ticket for the new areas vacated by the previous student section that will now be in the endzone) - $2.8 million
So, the 4800 new general seats actually bring in LESS money than the (about) 1600 new premium seats.
Overall, the expansion will bring in roughly an additional $7mil/yr(IF prices don't go up) without considering the increased revenue from concessions, merchandise, etc...