New Bobby Dodd Stadium survey from AA

cbee said:
we had two games of over 46,000 that year making a capacity of 43,263 impossible.
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We didn’t know what the stadium capacity was for a long time, as hard as that is to believe, so it’s possible that if we “sold out,” we just announced what we thought the capacity was. Eventually somebody actually counted the seats and realized that we’d been overestimating the capacity.

JRjr
 
athensjacket said:
There may have been some cooking of the books going on. At the time, the official capacity was still listed at 46,000, and only later did Tech officials admit that it actually had been 43,719. And I know we have a problem with attendance in general, but my contention is that fans are drawn to winning teams far more than fancy stadiums.
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For the most part and in most cases I agree with your contention. I just believe it to be less true at GT. Like I said early on, go back to the Dodd years. Rarely a sellout. And that was before the influx of pro sports into the market. I see GT as unique in the sense that most alumni leave the city and even the state after graduation. On top of that, the alumni at GT is not defined by the success of the football program like it is at so many of the factories. Again, this is coming from a sidewalk fan. Attended my first game in 1966 vs. Penn State and these observations are based on a lot of time spent at Grant Field.
 
cbee said:
For the most part and in most cases I agree with your contention. I just believe it to be less true at GT. Like I said early on, go back to the Dodd years. Rarely a sellout. And that was before the influx of pro sports into the market. I see GT as unique in the sense that most alumni leave the city and even the state after graduation. On top of that, the alumni at GT is not defined by the success of the football program like it is at so many of the factories. Again, this is coming from a sidewalk fan. Attended my first game in 1966 vs. Penn State and these observations are based on a lot of time spent at Grant Field.
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As I said, we do have a problem with attendance. As you point out, most of the alums leaving the city are the biggest reason. Another is that Tech has always had fewer students and alums than most other P-5 schools. But consistent winning will help. What won't is stadium enhancements and jacking up ticket prices.

By the way, nice first game - the only meeting between Paterno (first year at Penn State) and Dodd (final season). I liked it when Joe Pa was still coaching because he was the last link to the Dodd years.
 
Bbz_13 said:
Could not agree more. My wife has Michigan season tickets and she pays $95 per game per seat in row 66 (plus, obviously, a required annual donation). I don’t even want to know how much seats in their equivalent of our lower level cost.

The way CFB is now we will not have the team we all want unless we have fans willing to spend/donate more than they do now. The table stakes for a reliable 8-4 or 9-3 team have risen a lot over the last 20 years.
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Thanks for coming by and posting #8! Enjoy those Wolverines...
 
Bbz_13 said:
Could not agree more. My wife has Michigan season tickets and she pays $95 per game per seat in row 66 (plus, obviously, a required annual donation). I don’t even want to know how much seats in their equivalent of our lower level cost.

The way CFB is now we will not have the team we all want unless we have fans willing to spend/donate more than they do now. The table stakes for a reliable 8-4 or 9-3 team have risen a lot over the last 20 years.
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I'm ambivilant about changes to the stadium experience, but I gurantee you I don't give a rat's ass whant some idiotic chick in Michigan thinks. There's nothing else to do in Ann Arbor except maybe be a victim of a drive-by shooting.
 
GTRules said:
We really need to get rid of the abortion that is the upper North. It's hideous and only fags sit there.
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ahem. been there 12,13 years. can't remember exactly. it worked for us. row 1 helped a lot. moving to upper west though. also row 1.
 
GTROY said:
You guys are why we can't have nice things. You constantly complain that the GTAA doesn't listen to you, then they send you a survey with ideas and you crap over it and don't fill it out.

You all HAVE to know that you've been completely spoiled being able to buy a season ticket for a P5 team (IN THE LOWER LEVEL) for $199/seat for the last decade. These people have to make money to put a quality product on the field. I get that people aren't made of money, but nowhere in the survey did it say that reasonably priced tickets are going away. Ticket prices will likely rise a bit, but they are not going to chairback the upper levels. As for throwing dollar figures around, they are trying to hone in on "willingness to pay." It's business strategy 101.

Honestly this thread reads like something off of a dwag board. If we want to win, we can't cut prices, or even leave them the same. Clemson is dominating the ACC not because they hired a genius as HC; it's because they hired an incredible fund-raiser as HC. We have to bring in more money to be competitive.
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Bingo!
 
I think what some of you are missing is that winning more football games in the modern climate requires a LOT more annual revenue than we are currently bringing in. All of these proposals are designed to bring in more yearly dollars. More Recurring Revenue -> More Recurring Spending (recruiting, coaching) -> More Winning.

Here's a fairly recent list of revenues for athletic departments. We are dead last in ACC schools that reported (Private schools typically don't have to report this, which would exclude Miami, Duke, Wake) - https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/

For instance, don't you all agree that over the long-term, you'd like to be a better athletic program than Utah? We are 9 spots behind them. What about West Virginia? We are 10 spots behind them. Let's start finding unique ways to pull in more recurring revenue and we will probably see our prospects on the field improve as well.

I don't think we should make every seat in the stadium super expensive, but I do think we're spoiled by getting lower level seats to a P5 program for so little every year.
 
GTROY said:
I think what some of you are missing is that winning more football games in the modern climate requires a LOT more annual revenue than we are currently bringing in. All of these proposals are designed to bring in more yearly dollars. More Recurring Revenue -> More Recurring Spending (recruiting, coaching) -> More Winning.

Here's a fairly recent list of revenues for athletic departments. We are dead last in ACC schools that reported (Private schools typically don't have to report this, which would exclude Miami, Duke, Wake) - https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/

For instance, don't you all agree that over the long-term, you'd like to be a better athletic program than Utah? We are 9 spots behind them. What about West Virginia? We are 10 spots behind them. Let's start finding unique ways to pull in more recurring revenue and we will probably see our prospects on the field improve as well.

I don't think we should make every seat in the stadium super expensive, but I do think we're spoiled by getting lower level seats to a P5 program for so little every year.
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Trying to squeeze more money out of a relatively small fan base is fine, perhaps our only option. But, the list of the top 25 stadiums in capacity and the top 25 programs in revenue has an incredibly high correlation. Eight of the top 10 in revenue are in the top 10 in stadium size. If you look at the top 25 on both lists - there are only five on the stadium list not in the top 25 revenue list - Notre Dame (private) and USC (private) would surely make it 22 of 25 if they reported. The other three play in large, off-campus stadiums - UCLA, UAB, and San Diego State.

Perhaps we have kept our stadium too long. I wonder if the better long term revenue strategy, which would require either a new stadium, or closing Techwood, would be to see us play in an 80,000 seat stadium, with many more lower seats in the lower level than we currently have in the East and South stands and of course, larger upper deck all the way around. You would have to make attending Tech games fun and affordable to fill up a much larger stadium. But, getting people into the stadium is important. Get them hooked on game day and they will pay for better seats. If the barrier to entry is too high, getting new season ticket holders is going to prove difficult.

In a city with pro football, pro basketball, pro soccer and pro baseball, other colleges now playing football in the metro area, UGA in Athens, and places like Auburn and Clemson two hours away and Bama, Florida, FSU, Tennessee and South Carolina not so far away, I just do not believe there are corporate ticket buyers out there that have just been waiting for Georgia Tech to provide more amenities for high dollar seats.

I believe we are simply going to have to be a "do as much as you can with less" school unless we can cultivate a few super donors. Oklahoma State and Louisville come to mind. Someone quite rich has to want to see Tech succeed enough to help us catch up in revenue to the tune of 20/30 million annually or a bigger gift that endows that type of revenue annually. Boone Pickens gave $652,000,000 in his lifetime to OSU for both athletics and academics, with a single 2006 donation of $165,000,000 to Cowboy sports. One or two donors like that are game changers. I like that he said he did not give the money to athletics for a better parking place or nicer suite or for an honorary degree or to get his name on a new place - he gave to help his alma mater win championships.
 
Maybe the root of all of the attendance issues go back to the idiotic decision to leave the SEC. We lost old rivalries from that and rivalries create interest which creates attendance. To add to that, we are all in a state that breathes sec football and most will watch ole miss and Mississippi state play before they would watch Tech play uva. This is all to say that outside of games against Clemson, FSU, and to a certain degree Miami (all of which are big brand schools sort of an exception to the acc), it’s hard to draw interest and attendance. Who really gives a öööö about going to see Tech play Boston College?
 
athensjacket said:
First we need to fill the one we have.
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Yeah, that’s the big hole in the plan that I see. “Make games fun and affordable to fill an 80k stadium.”

Our games are relatively affordable now (some folks are arguing that they’re TOO cheap for us to be able to compete), and we can’t fill a 55K stadium. Spending like half a billion bucks to remake it into an 80k stadium isn’t going to make tickets MORE affordable than they are now. Plus we’d be adding a bunch of worse seats, creating a miserable experience as the infrastructure around the stadium and campus isn’t really set up for 80k crowds, and wrecking what few things we currently have going for us - a historic stadium where most of the seats are pretty good.

The #1 thing that makes games fun is fielding a competitive team. CPJ’s good years, which were the most fun I’ve had since Joe Hamilton days, showed us that that’s not enough to get people into the stadium. We can try to add a bunch of non-football bullshit to make it fun for people who don’t care about football, but that will ultimately annoy the people who do care about football, and the people who only come for the “fun” will eventually figure out that they can get they can get the fun elsewhere.

JRjr
 
I think on the reals, Tech students are just not made of football fan stuff for the most part. If we want to fill the stadium, we either need to start heavily recruiting fans from the city or change the experience to cater to nerds.

If we had enough control to simply say "all games are now night games", that would also instantly fix it. We have the best night stadium in CFB, with the skyline. Always a great atmosphere at night.
 
Didn't FSU use state funds to improve their stadium? They just added academic building to the outside or something to that effect. Maybe we could use our own endowment to build a new academic facility on North Ave with beer gardens and suites on the field side.
 
vapspwi said:
The #1 thing that makes games fun is fielding a competitive team. CPJ’s good years, which were the most fun I’ve had since Joe Hamilton days, showed us that that’s not enough to get people into the stadium.
JRjr
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The key is consistency. Popping up with a good team now and again won't fill the stadium, but over time, a consistently good team is sure to increase fan interest and attendance.
 
It would be nice if we could partner with ATL United to create some game ticket packages like a reduced price for a ticket to a ATL game and a GT game in the same day or weekend. The ATL games are usually packed, and I'd guess there are at least some people at those games without a CFB team to cheer for.
 
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