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Morris: Are these seats taken?
With USC requiring season ticket holders to pay premiums, taking the family toa football game may be a thingof the past
Posted on 08.17.08
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SOUTH CAROLINA’S PLAN for jacking up ticket prices to future football games was initially called “seat premiums.” Eric Hyman, USC’s athletics director, prefers to call the surcharge “seat donations.”
I call it the price USC fans finally must pay to compete in the Southeastern Conference.
Welcome to corporate America, folks. Welcome to big business. Welcome to 21st century collegiate athletics. The days are long gone when supporting your favorite college meant purchasing a couple of season tickets, wearing the school colors and waving a pennant at games.
These days, you must join the booster club (that will be $2,500, please), purchase the season ticket ($250), pay for parking ($200) and fork out a “donation” (another $250). While you are at it, check that bottled water at the gate so you can pay $5 for the same inside the stadium.
It is the way of the sports world, especially when your favorite team competes at the highest level, which in this case is the SEC. You better keep up with Florida, Tennessee and Georgia, or you will find yourself exactly where USC has been since it joined the league in 1992 ... either in the basement or in the middle of the conference pack.
Hyman’s plan is to raise an additional $7.6 million in annual revenue. The “donations,” which will range from $50 to $395 per seat per season for full-season ticket books, will affect 48,500 seats in Williams-Brice Stadium.
Every school in the SEC, with the exception of Vanderbilt, levies the same kind of extra cost on season-ticket holders. It just took USC longer than the rest to explore this additional avenue for fundraising.
It took Hyman less than three years to realize USC could never consistently compete for conference championships without raising the stakes. USC, which has always treaded water in the SEC, was headed toward a drowning.
“The challenge in this league is that you just can’t hold serve,” Hyman says. “If you’re holding serve, you’re going to get behind.”
Naturally, in proposing an additional way to generate revenue, Hyman comes across as the guy wearing the black hat. Instead of screaming for Hyman’s head, though, USC fans should understand his actions are directly the result of inaction by the previous athletics department administration, one that had neither the foresight nor the wherewithal to face the financial realities of competing in the SEC.
It is kind of like the car owner who pays a steep price at the end for not changing the oil along the way, or the home owner who lets his property deteriorate before spending a fortune for upgrades at the time of sale.
Under the previous athletics administration, the solution for USC’s financial woes was to call on state and local agencies to help the cause (the Colonial Life Center comes to mind) or to single out the same five or six long-time donors for assistance.
The result was USC loyalists got to live on Easy Street for most of the past two decades. While other SEC schools increased ticket prices, added a surcharge for those tickets and used the additional revenue to improve facilities, USC stood still. It did not want to burden its biggest base — its loyal fans — with the high cost of competing in the SEC.
Now, along comes Hyman, who has a master plan to raise $200 million for facilities improvements. He has expanded USC’s base of big-time donors, and now he is holding his hand out to the little guys.
There are a couple of unfortunate offshoots to Hyman’s plan. First, it could not come at a worse time. Thanks to an economy that has tanked over the past seven-plus years, folks simply do not have much expendable income. It is easy to eliminate a $200 to $300 afternoon at the stadium, when the game can be watched for free at home.
Also, the surcharge for tickets virtually eliminates the family of four attending games. That does not mean the family can no longer support its favorite college program. Instead, the family must be more selective. For football games, there always are single-game tickets available for purchase outside the stadium. For basketball and baseball games, purchase the cheaper tickets and sit a long way from the action.
A better option down the road will be for fans to turn their loyalty to other more affordable non-revenue sports, such as men’s and women’s soccer or women’s basketball. Exorbitant ticket prices and seat donations are a long way off in those sports.
For those loyal fans who want to help USC’s cause toward being more competitive in the SEC, recognition must come that there is a steep price to pay.
Hyman says he recently had a conversation with Mike Mungo, the senior member of the USC board of trustees, regarding the seat-donation plan.
“(Mungo) made a promise to the (SEC) commissioner that South Carolina would do the things necessary to be in stride with what the other Southeastern Conference schools have done,” Hyman says of when USC joined the league.
Now, Mungo told Hyman, USC is finally beginning to fulfill that promise to the SEC. It is finally getting around to asking its loyal fans to get on board.
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