Mailbag: The empty seats in Scott Stadium are a Carla Williams problem

I’ve watched UVA Football (and other) games for 50 years, most in person.

I grew up going to Georgia games in Athens.

There will never come a day when the two game days will be comparable, for a million reasons.

Every new football coach who arrives must adjust to the new reality of this fan base. It’ll never be Sanford Stadium or Death Valley. This fan base simply isn’t built for it and doesn’t necessarily want it.

Big Boy football is likely near-dead as an option here anyway, with the reality of the portal and NIL (see social media reax to Dabo Swinney’s intransigence re the portal after the UGA blowout). You’ve written about this. Teams like Virginia are likely to be more and more feeder schools to the Big Two.

I think Carla may have had to have her own discovery in this regard. Unless you’ve lived in and with it for decades it’s hard to grasp, from the outside, that college football as a culture was never – even when we were #1 – the year-round obsession that it is in any Deep South state. They have (and press tracks and leads this) four seasons that cover the whole year: recruiting; signing; spring/fall camp; games.

Even when we’re winning – and yes, excitement runs high – it wanes quickly when repeated success eludes. Where are the Kirbys, Barbers, Joneses of yore? As you’ve noted, much has changed since those halcyon days.

Football needs to be the financial anchor, we all agree. And it seems to me (am I wrong here?) the athletic department writ large has fared very well over those seven years.

I’m not even necessarily even arguing for even more leeway at admissions (though I’d never say no to it). But without that leeway, with a far stronger NIL presence, top-flight coaches and players will just say no thanks.

Great win Saturday. Still a fan. Always proud.

But we have never been set up culturally in the state of Virginia like Tony was at Clemson or Carla was in Athens.

Alan

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The big issue with the empty seats that I wrote about yesterday is the money issue.

Virginia Tech, over the past five non-COVID seasons, has been bringing in $7.5 million more per season in football ticket sales.

Tech hasn’t been all that competitive the past five seasons. They fired their coach in the middle of that run.

Where us missing out on millions of dollars in unrealized ticket revenues hurts us: for example, men’s basketball, where, I’m told, Tony Bennett has been told that he won’t be able to fill the two open spots on his staff, because of budget issues.

That’s one area impacted that I know of. I’m left to wonder what else might be there that I don’t know about.

The rest of the athletics program, as you note, seems to be doing fine, competitively. Only two sports make money, unfortunately, and the one that should be paying for everything else is coming up far short in the making money department.

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Sorry, Chris, we won’t ever fill the stadium consistently.

1. The last addition was completed right before economy tanked. Very unfortunate.
2. The landscape of college football changed. The big boys got unreachable.
3.  Still don’t have a great population base near Charlottesville.
4. A horrible way to start the year is 80-degree opener in the early afternoon.
5. Silly as it may sound, several of my friends dropped tickets because of last year’s boondoggle of getting to their parking spots – an hour to Charlottesville, then 75 minutes more to their parking spots.
6. Carla’s handling of Bronco.
7. Carla’s lack of NIL foresight.

Points 2-5 doomed any momentum.    

#1 set us up for a stadium we can’t fill.

#6 took away our nice buildup of talent.

#7 cost Elliott a lot of returning players.

Realistic goal: 45,000 (in 2-3 years).

Be super happy with 50,000 occasionally.

But this will only happen with wins and significant showing of changes.

(My tickets are great, but five times the cost of seats one section over and 20 rows back. Charging me more does not increase ticket numbers.)

Keith

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We have to try, though.

What frustrates me is, it doesn’t seem we’re trying.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love the massive new scoreboard, but people aren’t going to come to games to see a 6,700-square-foot TV.

I don’t sense that the athletics department is doing anything in terms of the basics in trying to reach out to the many lapsed fans to try to lure them back.

Things we could try: lower prices, free tickets for kids to get their parents to bring them to games, incentives (free stuff when you come, free hot dog and a drink, something).

One idea that has been broached to me is: redo the seats so that they all have seatbacks, reducing capacity to around 50,000, but making the seating more accommodating.

Maybe redo part of the upper deck into a beer garden-type area like you see at Camden Yards and Nats Park.

Something, anything.

Right now, we’re doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result.