Lol, why oh why did you have to ask that?
Hmmm…
SE Louisiana: $40
Georgetown: $65
Kansas: $85
- SE Louisiana - $30 - Need people to show up during the break.
- Georgetown - $55 - Not what they used to be.
- Kansas - $125 - Not sure about this one, but its Kansas.
Sounds like you know more than me about this topic. This is what I would personally pay.
I started my career with the Chiefs and then went to the Stars… was fun, but I couldn’t cut it. Good on you for sticking with it.
$25
$75
$150
This is about what I was thinking.
Tickets are cheap to get in, but expensive to get close up. I’m doing the Orange Power Pass this year and it’s way better than my 300’s season tickets from previous seasons. I end up in the 300’s some but in the 200’s too.
- $25
- $100
- $300
Arena will be packed next year.
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$300 for KU…? Really?
Absolutely but I’m a homer. KU games are big.
I read this the same way. I think using analytics to make changes that could be good, but he did seem to leave the door open for increased if analytics call for it (but doubt they would).
Also agree arena is too big to fill up routinely unless we have elite team due to distance for large number of fans and yes the tv/thunder issue.
Memphis is buoyed by their city. If OSU was in OKC/Tulsa we’d likely be 80% to full for all games
I gotta be honest here, the season ticket price by the end of the year may not be too bad of an investment if this ESPN+ crap doesn’t get their act together… I live in Edmond and its about a 45 minute drive to Stillwater for me (Don’t ask me how fast I was going, I will plead the 5th), but a 6:00 tip off is difficult to get too. a 7:00 is do-able, but it involves a lot of hustle to make it up there by then… And Probably also means I am grabbing a Dirty Curty on the way out of town as dinner… 
It just depends on what you view as the goal: Increase basketball attendance or increase revenue for all sports. There is a reasonable and fair distribution of prices for fans of all income levels to attend games. If you want to go, you can find a cheap enough ticket, even if the seat isn’t great.
The problem is the donor seats. Empty seats in the 200 sections suggests to me that we do not have enough fan support at that income range to fill the arena on a nightly basis. However, there is enough fan support that the Athletic Department, to date, has not found the need to drop the prices to allow more fans in, essentially creating more exclusivity at the cost of more rowdy.
I don’t know if it’s as clean of a solution as just dropping prices across the board. What the Athletic Department is tacitly suggesting is that it would not be able to extract the donations from fans without providing a corresponding reward: Better seats. If they remove the donation entirely so that is more affordable for all fans, there will be a corresponding drop in revenue. You could theoretically create even more of a stratification in the arena, for example, having different price structures even by rows or individual seats. The issue there, of course, is it does not force fans who can afford to pay inflated prices into the seats priced at those inflated prices. Why would I pay $200 more for a seat than the guy next to me?
As a result, I do not think it’s as simple, as some suggest, as dropping prices across the board. Sometimes, it makes more sense to just keep the inflated prices. For example, without researching it, I highly doubt that we sold all of the suites at Boone Pickens this year. That doesn’t mean we should drop prices for all suites until all of our suites are sold, unless we view it as more important to have full capacity than the revenue (because we may sacrifice more revenue that way even if we get an additional customer). And in suites, where actual attendance matters less in creating a proper gameday environment, who cares if you didn’t sell them all if you’re otherwise maximizing revenue?
That’s what the analytics will probably determine: What is the sweet spot between overall revenue and attendance? If this were an ideal world, you would find a profit-maximizing sweet spot where total output (every ticket available is sold) matched maximum price (revenue is maximized). I just doubt it’s that easy, given the complexity of the donor situation. Theoretically, even if those donors are now paying a lower price, they would continue to provide to the Athletic Department whatever they have now saved – an actual donation. I just don’t think we live in that kind of world, and I think the Athletic Department realizes that.
The biggest problem is that our arena isn’t really built for profit maximizing because we overestimated the demand by putting in too many seats. If you drop prices to allow more fans in, overall revenue decreases. If you try to create a more diverse pricing structure, you make it easier for the high rollers to just move two rows back. But if you don’t do anything, you live with the graveyard we see most nights. You can throw analytics at the problem all you want, but it won’t solve the conundrum we created.
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I get that, and I agree. But we have to temper that with the reality that this is a college-level game. You’re saying we should pay 3x what certain tickets to NBA games cost.
I don’t think that dropping prices would help the attendance problem. Boynton bought tickets and is giving them away… I did the same thing a couple of years ago and one family took me up on the offer. For all of the games. One family did it. Boynton retweeted it. Free tickets.
I don’t think the interest is there… so they need to maximize revenue from those that are interested and then they need to protect those people by not giving away the seats around them, otherwise they will drop their tickets and just go game by game and get the free or extremely discounted ones.
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Can you elaborate on that?
…but if you have more people coming from dropped ticket prices, then you can make up more revenue through other means…
Let’s just say hypothetically we get more sellouts. 13,611 people coming to a game is a major economic boon for not only the university, but surrounding businesses.
(And yes, I understand that that number includes students.)
When I sold season tickets for two really bad franchises, I would hear all the time “you just give away the tickets around me for every game! Why should I pay $1500 for season tickets, when I could get them for free to every game!”
So… when you have people bought in to the program, you can’t make them feel like they got ripped off by giving the tickets around them away to every game.
Are there instances when a giveaway would be valuable? Absolutely. Georgetown on ESPN+ probably won’t be the best instance, but if the Wichita State game is on national tv, it’s probably a good idea. Or a mid-week Tech or K-State game.
The worst thing you can do, however, is sell single game tickets for less than what the season ticket per game price is.
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Fair enough. The Athletic Department would make more off concessions if more seats are filled, but I doubt it offsets what the donors bring in. And while we like to think the university is better off if Stillwater is better off, I doubt that’s really the case. If the bars on the strip sell more beers because we have 13,611 people there, the city will get more sales tax revenue but I don’t know how that extends to the university.
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IMO arena is not too big. I had season tickets after expansion and it was full and loud. However, as we all know, product declined and it sounds like the university did not adjust prices to fit the product. If they will adjust prices and product improves, GIA will be full again.
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