Clemson athletics looks to football to prevent deficit

GREENVILLE - Orders for football season tickets are slightly ahead of last year at this time, but the Clemson athletics department faces a potential operating deficit the next fiscal year.

Clemson should escape 2009-10 in the black, in part because Oliver Purnell left $1.375 million on the table when he became coach at DePaul, said Katie Hill, senior associate athletics director for internal affairs at Clemson.

Last year, Hill projected a shortfall of about $1.3 million, largely because of declining football ticket sales which fell off 11 percent. Belt-tightening, including a 10-percent cut in non-essential spending, and Purnell's decision to walk kept Clemson from dipping into its reserves.

Eric Keller, a former season-ticket holder from St. Simon's, Ga., said that as a financial planner, he empathized with Clemson's fiscal issues. But it became more practical and less costly to drop his IPTAY membership last year and attend fewer games, particularly during a season in which the schedule isn't sexy.

"The $4,000 layout a year for IPTAY, tickets and everything else that goes along with a trip there has been reallocated," Keller said. "For a while, laying out four grand for that was fine. Now it's not fine."

As families such as Keller's erode from the rolls, Clemson continues to mine new sources of revenue in hopes of generating enough dollars to balance the books.

"As far as the current fiscal year is concerned, I think we're going to remain in the black in spite of our decline in football ticket sales for last fall," Hill said.

"I won't be surprised about an operating deficit for the next (2010-11) operating year unless there's a steep rise out of recession, and I don't think that will be the case.

"Next year will be difficult. I'm hoping that last fall's football revenue was the low point and that we'll see ourselves start back up - however gradually that may be," Hill said.

"We told ourselves two years ago that we had enough to get through two years of recession. I think I can add a year to that if we had to, although we sure don't want to."

IPTAY members ordered 48,039 tickets by the April 30 deadline, approximately 1,000 more than a year ago, said ticket manager Travis Furbee. Ultimately, 51,708 season tickets were sold in 2009 compared to the record 58,134 sold after a re-seating plan went into effect in 2008.

Furbee said a public sale of season tickets would begin soon.

"We aren't going to stop here in May," he said. "But overall the indications now are a good sign."

Clemson increased the price of a football season ticket package by $10.

"Part of the reason for our very modest ticket price increase was simply to gain a little more revenue without driving purchasers out of the market," Hill said. "We'll see an increase in our Clemson Tigers Sports Network revenue, but other than that, everything else is flat at best.

"Next year is the last year in the ACC broadcast agreement, and we just have to get through it. Although no one's expecting SEC kind of money, we're hoping for a pretty substantial increase in 2011-12."