Students Not in Attendance
- Thread starter dogmatic
- Start date
Other than not having assigned seating, most of that is more or only relevant to non-students. I do think his one point about assigned seating is a good one. It's a lot to ask of students to expect them to get there more than an hour before kickoff for good seats, usually in sweltering heat, then sit through a game extended by tv timeouts, while not only prohibiting them from having alcohol, but giving them options of lukewarm water from a water fountain or overpriced food and drinks from the concession stand.
Can't really do anything about anything but the assigned seating, but allowing assigned seating will make pretty much all of the other problems manageable.
I think it would be neat to see some kind of loyalty points system. A problem is that just assigning seats (or allowing you to pick seats) based on how long you've been sitting there is a terrible system because most students like to sit with their friends, and sometimes you might show up to every game and your friend shows up to only half the games. That means you never would sit with him. So my proposal is that students are allowed to create and join seating groups. Some of these will be natural: fraternities, sororities, etc., but some might just be a group of 5 or 10 friends who get together for every game. You join a group and going to games earns points for your group. You come up with some kind of score for each group for each game and prioritize seating based on score (assigning seats would be automated, but you would tell the system in general what your preferences are). Your group gets its block of seats assigned for each game and all student seats become open 15 minutes before kickoff. The scoring would be done is such a way to penalize large groups with low attendance and to allow long-time attending groups to advance in priority. You could also make a part of the student section always first-come, first serve in case your group doesn't like its assigned location.
I thought the article raised some interesting ideas:
* Assigned seating would make a nice difference. Let students buy in blocs if they want. It would raise the argument of the Greeks getting the best seats, but no idea is perfect. Find a compromise.
* Concession prices could be adjusted to cater to students. Unless things are different than the used to be over there, the students are confined to a given area and others are excluded anyway. Could we have the concession prices in the student area adjusted downward in a manner similar to the price of their tickets? Dollar hot dogs and hamburgers, dollar cokes, etc. Satisfactory concession service to the students would be a requisite for holding the contract for concessions throughout the rest of the stadium. If selling the students theirs for a dollar meant prices elsewhere needed to go up 25 cents per transaction, so be it. Aren't they our future donors? Aren't they worth the investment? They don't pay anything close to full price for tickets. Why should they pay full price for concessions? Maybe this idea is already in place - I admit I've done no research here - but I'd think I'd have seen it mentioned here already if it were the case.
* Take a hard look at who the games are being produced for. The article did a nice job of showing the producers of the Michigan games thinking of them as one thing and the attenders of the games thinking of them as something else altogether. I presume our administration and the SEC front office is doing its best to serve both TV and in-person attendees, but their manipulations of the model make me curious. As the writer of the article points out, it's not your typical for-profit model, where a price that gets too high and squelches demand can just be lowered and make everything swing back into line. People come to football games because they want to. At some point, there may be an adjustment that makes them no longer want to, and how and whether that can be corrected, who knows? I do think it's reasonable to ask if the students don't attend when they're students, why would they ever do so later on?
* Assigned seating would make a nice difference. Let students buy in blocs if they want. It would raise the argument of the Greeks getting the best seats, but no idea is perfect. Find a compromise.
* Concession prices could be adjusted to cater to students. Unless things are different than the used to be over there, the students are confined to a given area and others are excluded anyway. Could we have the concession prices in the student area adjusted downward in a manner similar to the price of their tickets? Dollar hot dogs and hamburgers, dollar cokes, etc. Satisfactory concession service to the students would be a requisite for holding the contract for concessions throughout the rest of the stadium. If selling the students theirs for a dollar meant prices elsewhere needed to go up 25 cents per transaction, so be it. Aren't they our future donors? Aren't they worth the investment? They don't pay anything close to full price for tickets. Why should they pay full price for concessions? Maybe this idea is already in place - I admit I've done no research here - but I'd think I'd have seen it mentioned here already if it were the case.
* Take a hard look at who the games are being produced for. The article did a nice job of showing the producers of the Michigan games thinking of them as one thing and the attenders of the games thinking of them as something else altogether. I presume our administration and the SEC front office is doing its best to serve both TV and in-person attendees, but their manipulations of the model make me curious. As the writer of the article points out, it's not your typical for-profit model, where a price that gets too high and squelches demand can just be lowered and make everything swing back into line. People come to football games because they want to. At some point, there may be an adjustment that makes them no longer want to, and how and whether that can be corrected, who knows? I do think it's reasonable to ask if the students don't attend when they're students, why would they ever do so later on?