The JPJ part of the UVA Basketball season is over, which means, among other things, no more ads on the big screen hanging over the court promoting the UVA Football season opener in Brazil.
That ad campaign was akin to the one that got Kristi Noem fired by Donald Trump, in terms of its tone-deafness.
Hey, folks, look here at what we’re doing – we’re taking away one of your home football games next season, but if you’re among the 1 percent who can afford to get down to Brazil, join us!
But this is the same UVA Athletics that gave folks a year of lead time to cancel their basketball season tickets by telling everybody about their plans to jack up ticket prices for next season.
Dummkopfs.
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How bad things got with that: my wife, a former season-ticket holder (more on that in a sec), got an email ahead of the North Carolina game that offered seats in the lower bowl for fifty bucks a pop, with an incentive: buy this one, and we’ll give you a shot at a four- or six-game package with seats in the lower bowl at that same price point.
Y’all, they needed to incentivize folks to buy tickets for Carolina, the marquee game on the JPJ schedule this season.
Give ’em credit, it worked, for that one game, anyway – the official attendance was listed at 14,637, actually 44 fans over the official capacity.
(Cue the fire marshal.)
But overall, attendance was down this season – per the UVA Athletics website, the average for our home games in the 2025-2026 season was 12,885, down 4.3 percent from last year’s average of 13,478.
Last year’s team: 15-17.
Got the interim coach ousted.
This year’s team: 27-4.
Has us thinking we might be hanging a banner of some sort in a few months.
And this decline in attendance is a trend:
- the 2023-2024 season averaged 13,992 fans.
- 2022-2023: 14,219.
The decline from 2022-2023 to this season is 9.4 percent.
They’re running fans off in droves, ladies and germs.
I was flooded with emails from angry long-time season-ticket holders last spring when UVA Athletics announced the jacked-up prices beginning in the 2026-2027 season plan, with several of the angry folks telling me they were going to go ahead and get out early, given the uncertainties of how things would go with the new coach and new roster, and the feeling that the athletics department didn’t value them anymore.
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That 4.3 percent of those folks didn’t come back when the team started winning says a lot about how loyalty is a two-way street.
“Agree with you that UVA shot themselves in the foot with their basketball reseating and other assorted stupid policies,” one reader wrote me last week, venting his frustrations. “I had season tickets for 10 years and was a mid-level giver. I got tired of $12 beers and doubling of mandatory contributions and quit tickets this year, as did most of my neighbors. The arrogance is not attractive.”
I’ll go to the archives for another who had offered this quick math: with the cheapest lower-bowl seating behind the baseline requiring a $30,000 seat license, plus $17,500 in Virginia Athletics Foundation donations, plus $7,000 for the tickets themselves over five years, that comes to $10,800 a year for two lower-bowl tickets.
“Virginia plays an average of 17 home games per season, so patrons in this section will pay an average of $318 a ticket per game, not including parking. These are NBA prices,” the reader offered as an observation.
This is why my wife, the former season-ticket holder, decided to play the buy tickets game-by-game roulette, and how she was able to sit in the lower bowl for fifty bucks a pop for the UNC, Miami and NC State games, and had a lower-bowl seat for the Virginia Tech game that we didn’t end up using, after being berated by a UVA Athletics staffer ahead of the Wake Forest game last week, for visiting me in my seat in the media section before the game.
The folks over there seem to think they’re going to get people to commit $318 (and more!) per game for next year, when they had to go the emergency promotion route to fill the arena up for friggin’ North Carolina, and give folks several other games at bargain-basement prices to achieve that.
And then when they did get you in the door, they browbeat you with a tone-deaf reminder that they’ve moved one of our home football games next year to Brazil, as if any of us are going to plunk down $5,000 for one of the travel packages so we can fly 10 hours one-way to be a part of that spectacle.
ICYMI
They obviously learned nothing from the 2008 UVA Football reseating fiasco, which has us playing football games in front of thousands of empty seats here almost two decades later.
College athletics is a business; and these people aren’t qualified to run a front-yard lemonade stand.
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Chris Graham
