Rise in College Football Ticket Prices

Wall Street Journal (via ProQuest)

As teams look for new revenue streams, ticket prices are particularly attractive. Unlike income from things like TV rights and bowl games, teams don’t have to share ticket proceeds with their conferences.

For years, colleges have awarded the rights to buy the best season tickets based on a candidate’s tenure as a season-ticket holder: Fans with a longer tenure get first dibs on the best seats. But more colleges are now adopting a system similar to the pro teams, which offer so-called personal seat licenses, or one-time payments that give fans the right to buy season tickets.

Many teams say they have no choice but to raise prices. “If we didn’t do something, the only way to cut costs even further was to look at dropping some sports,” says Joe Parker, a senior associate athletic director at Michigan, which has a program that requires about 45% of season-ticket holders to pay a fee of $125 to $500 annually. He says efforts in recent years to cut costs helped put the athletic department in the black, but staying there was getting increasingly difficult.

Sometimes, watching the local pro team is now a better option financially than taking the family to the college game. For a season ticket in the premier club seating area at LP Field, home of the Tennessee Titans, fans have to pay $4,050 — a one-time fee of $1,500 on top of the $2,550 price tag for the eight-game package.

Some 160 miles east in Knoxville, the University of Tennessee is now offering high-rolling fans seats in the new East Club, which has 422 outdoor, theater-style seats under a cover. The cost: $4,000 a year for the seats, plus a $25,000 donation payable in equal installments over five years, bringing the total annual price tag to $9,000 for each of the first five years. The section has an adjoining hospitality club room with private restrooms, pre-game and halftime buffets. (Food isn’t included in the Titans plan.)