I’ve been, over the past few weeks, writing about, complaining about, trying to raise issue with, the 20,000 empties that we routinely see at Scott Stadium for UVA Football home games.
Even I was shocked with what we saw for Saturday’s home game with Louisville.
The official attendance: 32,688.
The official number of empties: 28,812.
Note that I’m using the word “official” here.
Word from a reliable source in the press box had the actual turnstile count in the 22,000 range.
Now, yes, it would be one thing if this was another 0-5 team, like we had last year, going into Game #6 with an FCS team, like last year with William & Mary, on the other sideline.
We still drew 38,289 for that one.
The last time I’m seeing attendance for a non-COVID home game below what we saw yesterday was way back in 1988, for the regular-season finale with Maryland, a 24-23 win on Nov. 19 that capped a 7-4 season.
Notably, 7-4 that year wasn’t good enough to get into a bowl.
Also worth noting: the capacity at Scott Stadium in 1988, and through the late 1990s, was 42,500.
It’s 61,500 now, and the stadium has had 64,947 for a game – the 2008 home opener with Southern Cal.
Yesterday wasn’t a function of the home team being at a low point – the ‘Hoos were 4-1 going in, 2-0 in the ACC.
It wasn’t the weather – temperatures were in the mid-70s at kickoff, not a cloud in the sky.
I’m not going to attribute it to apathy, either; I wrote two stories last week on the attendance issues; they drew, combined, 18,839 clicks on the website.
ICYMI: Flagging UVA Football attendance
- Another Saturday with 20K-plus empties at a UVA Football home game
- UVA Football: There’s a way to get the fans back. It starts with an apology.
- UVA Football: How about a ‘We Want You Back’ campaign to get the fans back?
Good team, good weather, people seem to care.
So, what is it, then, why did we have 28,812 empties yesterday, at a cost, based on the average dollar-generated-per-butt-in-seat figure from 2022 numbers, at $905,978 in lost ticket sales?
Think about that dollar figure for a second. That’s just lost dollars from ticket sales, which is to say, not counting the money lost for the two hot dogs that I got from the concession stand yesterday, when I scanned the options in the press box and decided, nah.
The hot dogs were not a great option, as it turned out; they reminded me of the hot dog from the “Seinfeld” episode at the vintage movie theater that had been there since the advent of talkies.
My buddy, Scott, went down at halftime to get some popcorn; he was told that they’d run out.
We had 22K in the stands, and the concession stand was somehow out of popcorn.
Scott was advised to try another concession stand; he did what UVA Football fans in general seem to be doing when it comes to matters involving the gameday experience at Scott Stadium, and just gave up.
Presumably, though, there would have been people buying the ancient hot dogs, the limited amount of popcorn available at select concession stands, maybe a hat or a T-shirt.
Just based on the official figures, UVA Athletics left $900K plus on the table from ticket sales, and if just going from the cost of my two hot dogs – $10 – at least another $280K there.
Throw in a soda, another $150K there.
You get the picture.
The team gave Louisville seven points with bad special teams play and left three off the board with an inexplicable decision to go for fourth-and-goal at the 3 in what turned out to be a four-point loss.
You can do the math there; the coaching staff blundered a win into a loss.
You can also do the math on how the day was a loss on the business side for UVA Athletics to the tune of, conservatively, $2 million, give-or-take, being left off the books.
Not because the team is in the doldrums, like last year. We were a two-minute warning away from being 5-1, and could have used 30,000 extra sets of lungs and vocal chords in that final two minutes, to make it harder for Louisville to score the eventual go-ahead score into the teeth of the south end zone.
As I wrote earlier in the week, the attendance issue dates back to the decision by the previous UVA Athletics administration, under the thumb of then-Athletics Director Craig Littlepage, to try to take advantage of the full stadiums in the Al Groh era to make more money by upping the donation floors on season-ticket holders, which worked in the short-term – the 2008 season brought in a record $11 million in football ticket revenues.
But as the Groh era fizzled, the Mike London era brought us one winning season in six years, and Bronco Mendenhall found himself run out of town after leading the program to the Orange Bowl in Year 4, the sales numbers have waned.
UVA Football, since the arrival of Carla Williams, from the University of Georgia, where they play big-boy football, in 2017, has averaged $8.4 million a year over the five non-COVID seasons in her tenure as AD, accounting for 2020 and the missing final home game of the 2022 season after the Nov. 13 shooting tragedy that forced the cancellation of the remainder of that season.
That $8.4 million a year is about half the inflation-adjusted value of the $11 million that UVA Athletics brought in from football ticket sales in 2008, which would now be valued in 2024 dollars at $16.1 million.
How appropriate, then, that we’re bringing in about half what we did when UVA Athletics went for the big money at the expense of its middle-class base of fans, because now the stadium is half-empty.
The 2007-2008 money grab wasn’t Williams’ fault, but she’s had seven years now to fix the problem that she inherited, and the two things she’s done to address football in her seven years at the helm is build an $80 million football operations center that isn’t helping a lick with recruiting, and run off the literally one coach in the program’s history to get UVA Football into a top-tier bowl game not named George Welsh to hire a guy who tore everything down to start from scratch.
In terms of business moves, both are head-scratchers, and that’s not accounting for the lack of any attention to detail from the folks up top in terms of the basics in trying something, anything, to try to get people who were told a generation ago that their money wasn’t good enough to want to come back.
If you think this is just window-dressing, hey, even the window-dressing didn’t look good on national TV today, such as the flailing ACC Network is national TV, with the camera operators at a loss for how to shoot the game without showing the sea of empties.
The millions in lost revenue from each home game, adding up to serious millions at the end of each season, are a big reason why UVA Athletics needs to get the academic side to charge UVA students $750 a year in mandatory athletics fees to help the athletics department balance the books with the $16 million it gets each year from that pool of money.
Think about how dumb that is, that kids already borrowing money for the privilege of matriculating on Grounds have to borrow an additional $3,000 over the course of their time at UVA because the athletics department can’t sell tickets to football games.
They’ll be paying that money back for years, all because well-paid people at the top of UVA Athletics, and the University administration, aren’t doing their jobs.
I get it, that I’m the bad guy here, for demanding accountability.
I’ll be the one here to say it out loud: nobody else writes about this because the University of Virginia, as an institution, doesn’t like being criticized, and uses its economic power and academic prestige to stifle dissenting views.
This issue with lagging football ticket sales being balanced on the backs of UVA students is but one of many areas where UVA is not above reproach.
I’ll take the hits here if it can help get the ball down the field toward people doing what they need to do.
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Chris Graham
