I wonder how many people who want UVA Football tickets had the same issue that I did just now with the Buy Tickets link on the football schedule page on the UVA Athletics website.
Try as I might, I kept getting a This site can’t be reached error when I efforted to log on to research how much tickets for this weekend’s game with Louisville would set the average fan back.
And yes, I’m aware that people can get better deals on StubHub or SeatGeek – you can get into Scott Stadium for $14 a ticket in the upper deck, and I’m seeing seats in the lower bowl going for as low as $21.
All well and good.
Maybe nobody uses the Buy Tickets link on the schedule page, so nobody’s complained yet.
That seems like a problem in and of itself.
ICYMI: UVA Football attendance issues
- Another Saturday with 20K-plus empties at a UVA Football home game
- UVA Football about to make a big move to better utilize its NIL resources
- UVA Football: The empty seats in Scott Stadium are a Carla Williams problem
- More fun with public-records requests: A look at UVA Football season-ticket sales
- What is Carla Williams doing to fix UVA football? It’s time for accountability
That being what it is, there are myriad reasons why we’re not able to even get 40,000 for the homecoming game, and you have to think the UVA Athletics website being iffy – I tried for 45 minutes to get that stupid link to work before finally getting through – is among them.
Parking, lack thereof, is another issue.
The continued issues with concessions is another.
Weak in-stadium WiFi. Glitches with scanning the online tickets at the gate.
These were among the litany of complaints listed by fans on a thread on the AFP Facebook page attached to my story on last week’s low attendance.
The matter with having more than 20,000 empties each week isn’t, at least this year, a function of the team not doing well.
The ‘Hoos are 4-1 overall and 2-0 in the ACC at this writing, and with the 38K and change that made it out this past Saturday for the win over Boston College, we’re averaging right at 40,000 in the 61,500-seat Scott Stadium through three home games, at the midpoint of the six-game home schedule for the 2024 season.
We probably won’t get there again this weekend with Louisville in town, even with the chance to get to 5-1 for the first time since 2007, because the students start fall break on Friday, so their numbers are certainly going to be way down.
That 2007 season that I mentioned there turns out to be the beginning of when things started to go downhill for UVA Football, which averaged 59,824 fans at its home games that year, as the team finished with a 9-4 record.
The athletics department decided, before the 2007 season, to try to take advantage of the upswing by requiring season-ticket holders to significantly increase their annual giving to a minimum of $6,200 per year, setting the rollout of what became known as reseating until the 2008 season.
The move led to a one-year boost in football ticket revenues – a program-record $11 million in the 2008 season.
But the short-term windfall – the UVA Football program has averaged $8.3 million in football ticket sales over the past five non-COVID seasons, dating back to 2017 – came at the expense of the relationship between UVA Athletics and many long-time fans who couldn’t afford the much-higher giving threshold, and felt abandoned by the program that some had supported for decades.
“UVA Athletics did this to themselves in 2008 with their money grab reseating policy, and they’ve never recovered,” long-time fan Chris Dorrier wrote on the AFP Facebook page thread.
Dorrier still is a season-ticket holder, but you can tell from his comment that the sting of what UVA Athletics did in 2008 still feels fresh.
“The 2008 reseating policy drove out most of those supporters, and the attendance numbers show that every home game,” Dorrier wrote. “There are some of us still attending, but UVA’s greed is what led to the lack of attendance, yet they’re still too smart to realize or address it. Carla Williams (the athletics director at UVA) doesn’t have a clue, as she came from a rabid fan base at Georgia which she’ll never find here, and because of finances and optics she’ll never be able to connect or understand that. Even though the athletic department hemorrhages money every home game, they still don’t have the awareness or intelligence to market to the local fan.
“Congratulations to Coach Elliott and the Wahoos for getting to 4-1. It’s a shame the AD and administration doesn’t have the acumen to fill the stadium and support them,” Dorrier wrote.
After that 2007 team drew an average of just under 60,000 fans per home game, the 2008 season opener had a record 64,947 in Scott Stadium for Southern Cal.
We’ve had 60,000 for a game once in the 16 years since, for the 2011 Virginia Tech game, which means, not even winning in 2018, when UVA finished 8-5, or 2019, when that team won nine regular-season games, earned a spot in the ACC Championship Game and snagged an invite to the Orange Bowl, could do the trick.
Video: UVA Football needs to get its fans back
I can understand season tickets being below the 15,000 mark going into this season, given that the program is coming off back-to-back three-win seasons, and that the ‘Hoos were picked to finish 16th in the 17-team ACC in the preseason.
But Tony Elliott and Co. are winning games now, and several folks who weighed in on the AFP Facebook page thread who made it clear that they don’t like that I write so often on this topic offered versions of the “if they win, people will come” line.
If that was true, then explain to me that 2019 season, featuring home games with Florida State (57,826) and Virginia Tech (52,619).
The Tech game was with the in-state ACC rival with an ACC Championship Game spot on the line, and there were still 9,000 empties.
This ain’t about winning and losing.
Reader after reader in our Facebook page thread made the point that this is a problem that dates back 16 years, and is not going to go away with time.
“The message was sent to ‘townies’ that unless you met the new minimum for donations, you would lose spots,” wrote Todd McArthur, a double-Wahoo and self-described “townie.” “A lot of locals decided to ditch UVA Football. I don’t blame them. Good luck winning them back.”
“Won’t likely ever recover from the seat relocation they did to their long-time season-ticket holders years ago,” reader Andrew Woodrum wrote. “Took their good seats and moved them up top if they didn’t donate. Suddenly all the real fans were gone, and the people that got their seats would rather mingle in the parking lot eating brie. Big mistake doing your loyal fans dirty.”
“After my family’s seats were moved from the ones they’d had for years (40 yard line, seven rows back from the UVA bench) to goal-line/12 rows back due to the donation fiasco, my father-in-law was ranting about the new seats, and one of the ushers said to him, ‘I’m so tired of hearing you people complain about their seats.’ Only been back a couple of times,” reader Jason Farish wrote.
The message that I saw as I pored through this comment thread was, there are plenty of items that need to be addressed – parking and accommodations, food and drink offerings, seemingly simple-to-solve things like in-stadium connectivity, ticket prices.
It’s frustrating that those have been problems for years, and are still issues.
That’s a lack of attention to detail and follow through on the part of folks on the business side of the athletics program.
The bigger issue, this one with long-time fans still feeling like they were passed by for money reasons 16 years ago, I don’t know that you can do anything to get that obviously large segment of fans back.
We’re talking, in a lot of those cases, about people who had been going to games with their kids and their kids’ kids, and neighbors and co-workers and college buddies, and their seat partners who had become football-season friends, for decades, and then, in a flash, that was all gone.
For all the people who are still angry about having that taken away, there are multiples more – these folks’ kids, their neighbors’ and co-workers’ and college buddies’ kids – who didn’t grow up going to UVA Football games, didn’t become fans like their parents and grandparents did, and don’t even have UVA Football on their internal radar.
There’s a way to get them back.
It starts with an apology.
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Chris Graham
