from this article about VT\'s trouble selling Orange Bowl tix. i\'m infuriated at the Orange Bowl\'s smugness about the situation. They keep the best tickets to themselves and force the schools to eat the cost of their allotted, unsold, less desirable tickets. Then they claim that they wouldn\'t want to shortchange schools by allotting them fewer tickets. As if there is no other solution in the world that could possibly exist.
Other than of course, you know, giving the schools better seats and not forcing them to eat the cost of unsold tickets.
http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2010/12...range-bowl
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The problem isn\'t only pricing. Fans can often get better seats through the secondary market - or directly through the bowl\'s ticket office. Weaver said bowl games keep the majority of the best seats to sell.
The Orange Bowl has sold roughly 30,000 tickets to the game, in addition to the 35,000 tickets for which Virginia Tech and Stanford are on the hook. Many of the schools\' allotted tickets are for seats in the upper deck, corners and end zones of Sun Life Stadium, while the bowl is selling a larger number of lower-level and sideline seats.
"That is an issue that I and my colleagues, other athletic directors, have been fighting for the last couple of years," Weaver said. "We could sell more of our tickets if we had better tickets to sell."
It\'s a system that seems set up to guarantee the bowl a profit while putting the schools - for whom the game is supposed to be a reward - at risk of losing money.
"I don\'t know if that\'s necessarily true," said Larry Wahl, the Orange Bowl\'s vice president of communication. "Historically, schools have sold their allotments no matter where the locations were."
But those were games featuring two traditional powers with strong traveling fan bases. The Orange Bowl from 2003 to 2006 featured match-ups of Southern Cal-Iowa, Miami-Florida State, Southern Cal-Oklahoma, and Florida State-Penn State.
Since then, the game has hosted Wake Forest-Louisville, Virginia Tech-Kansas, Virginia Tech-Cincinnati and Georgia Tech-Iowa. In all those games, at least one team brought a relatively small crowd. That means scalpers who buy tickets to big events months in advance, hoping to make a profit on a high-demand game, end up dumping them cheap online.
Which in turn means schools such as Virginia Tech get stuck with a big bill.
So why force the schools to buy such a large number and eat the cost if they go unsold? Is that really a reward for a great season?
"Again, historically you\'ve had sold-out bowls and the schools couldn\'t get enough seats," Wahl said. "If we sold 45,000 ourselves and only had 12,000 for the teams, then somebody would complain that you didn\'t hold enough back for the schools."
