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Virginia needs a full Scott Stadium Saturday night: How to get it

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uva football entrance
Photo courtesy UVA Athletics.

Virginia is averaging 39,052 fans for its four games at Scott Stadium this season, 63.5 percent of capacity.

A lot of folks want to blame the fan base for not turning out.

I continue to blame Virginia Athletics for not trying harder to get fans to turn out.

As I write this, I have a window open on my desktop with the single game tickets available for Saturday night’s game with Georgia Tech.

Scads of tickets are available in the upper decks starting at $25, basically across the horn from section 504 all the way over to the other side of the stadium at 527, then some more in 530-531, 533-535, and 538-539.

Some of the tickets are listed at $50, with a limited availability of $60 tickets, both of which seems pricey for an upper-deck seat, if you ask me – particularly seats that have largely been empty this season.

For help in what the prices should be, we can get a look at the secondary market.

StubHub has upper-deck seats starting at $12.

Fifty bucks a ticket, at this writing, can get you a pair on the 50, lower level, row UU, and for $60 apiece, you can get two at the 40, lower level, row N.

Maybe try differential pricing, considering that we’re four games in, and we’re at 89,792 empties and counting?

I dunno, there are worse ideas.

Like, for example, leaving the seats unsold.

Even if you filled all those empties at just 12 bucks a pop, the lower end of what they’re going for this week on StubHub, that’s another $1.1 million in revenues for UVA Athletics.

USA Today pegged ticket sales for UVA Athletics in the 2019-2020 athletics year at $15.5 million, so that $1.1 million would add another 7.1 percent to the bottom line.

And if we can project out for the remaining home games, assuming the current attendance trend, 12 bucks a pop times 22,448 extra tickets sold per game would bring in an additional $800,000-plus in revenue, another 5.2 percent to the bottom line.

How much would that extra $1.9 million help out the cause for the UVA Athletics program?

USA Today had the program running a $1.5 million deficit in 2019-2020.

That’s the bottom-line cost of not filling up Scott Stadium for football.

There are other costs. Saturday night could be a showcase for the University, with TV in town for a national broadcast, but if the director has to continually cut from shots that would otherwise show a sea of empties, not so much.

And then there’s how my new buddy Gerry Capone is trying to raise $180 million to fund a new football performance center, but … for what?

To help out a football program that can’t figure out how to get people to come to games to watch a team going for its second straight Coastal Division title and Orange Bowl berth?

And then you have to wonder what Bronco Mendenhall will be thinking when he takes his team out to where he used to coach, BYU, which is averaging 62,182 fans per home game – 97.6 percent of capacity.

His kids will see what it feels like to play in front of a fan base that supports its team, win or lose, and he’ll have to think to himself, I left this for … a sea of empties.

This is on the folks in the ticket office.

Ideally, yes, we want to sell tickets for what should be face value, but we also want – need! – the butts in the seats.

It’s time, then, to pull out all the stops, leave no stone unturned, et cetera.

Specials, two for one deals, free hot dogs and drinks, whatever it takes.

And if the current people in the ticket office can’t get it done, we can find some new people who can give it a better try.

Story by Chris Graham

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