Football tix e-mail to UM faculty/staff
Athletic Department e-mail from this afternoon re: UM faculty/staff about football tickets:
U-M Faculty/Staff,
A limited number of season tickets are available for the 2014 Michigan Football Season to U-M Faculty/Staff. As a U-M Faculty/Staff member, season tickets are offered at a 10% discount ($409/seat vs. the regular price of $455/seat). Each Faculty/Staff member is allowed a maximum of two (2) season tickets at this reduced rate, with any additional tickets being regular price. If you already hold Faculty/Staff season tickets, any new season tickets under this offer will be regular price.
Additionally, the required donation typically associated with the opportunity to purchase Michigan Football season tickets is $500, but for a limited time, U-M Faculty/Staff can take advantage of a special offer of an entry donation of only $100. Keep in mind, the Preferred Seat Donation (PSD) associated with season tickets will be applicable for the renewal of these additional tickets for the 2015 season.
For only $818 (plus a $15 service charge), U-M Faculty/Staff can be the proud owners of two (2) season tickets for the 2014 Michigan Football Season with the opportunity to renew season tickets as long as you like.
You may also opt to have your season ticket cost deducted from your paycheck in three installments (July, August, September - entry donation not eligible for payroll deduction).
Only U-M Faculty/Staff have been offered this combined ticket price discount and donation discount.
I don't remember receiving such an e-mail in recent years so I'm guessing the AD is really sweating about season ticket sales for 2014.
Isn't that a seriously discounted price? Why should Faculty & Staff get tix cheaper than students?
they don't, the faculty/staff cost is over $100 more than the student price
Thought I saw a post from someone saying theirs was $400+.
Nothing to see here - carry on. :)
Even if the faculty tickets were cheaper, no one should have an issue with that. That's called a work perk. If you want that perk, then try to get a job there (assuming you're not a current student).
at UM on two separate occassions (IT Contract work). I have no problem with Faculty tix being cheaper than the "street" price. However, asking a student shelling out tons of money in tuition, books, and room & board to foot a bigger piece of the pie than a faculty member making six figures. Sorry, that's just me.
Yeah, or we could be like Oregon State and have football tickets for students be FREE!
However, asking a student shelling out tons of money in tuition, books, and room & board to foot a bigger piece of the pie than a faculty member making six figures. Sorry, that's just me.
Just an FYI, an insane majority of UM Faculty/Staff make well below $100k per year. If I had to guess, it would be in the high 90% that make less than 100k. Even if you take out minimum-wage staff and custodial type work, I bet the percent under 100k drops down to only the high 80s.
...what are we going to do about these fatcat adjuncts and lecturers?
Most of the staff that I know makes 35k/year... http://www.umsalary.info/
Student tix are $295 with no PSD, so this is still significantly more than the student price
More math, less cowbell.
a math problem, but instead a reading comprehension problem. LOL
Could have sworn I saw someone say their Student Tix were over $400 - but guess I need to go back to school and also seek help for my reading disability.
We are all sylecdix sometimes :)
...UNTIE!
Depends on where the seats are too. My tickets are at about the 10 yard line behind the visiting band row 72 or something. Costs me just over 900 before my non-forced donation of 200 per seat...
Just needed patience to wait out the price drop, and a bottle of Maker's Mark to sneak in to help stomach the game.
of Maker's Mark to "stomach a game", you need to find a new hobby, team or sport to watch. Don't worry about waiting out stub hub. Stay home and paint or something....
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hyperbole
Or he could be serious as all hell, and....well, really, can you blame him after last season?
Was literally about to post this, but with more commentary. Guess I snoozed on that opportunity. Needless to say the AD is having some serious trouble with ticket sales this year. It'll be interesting to see if attendence actually suffers significantly come game day.
home & home with a big name team for the alternating years - I guess the closest we have is Arkansas in 2018.
I see that we got Wisconsin in 2016 as well though with the 9-game schedule...so maybe 2014 is the oddity vs the new standard of crappy home schedules.
Where anyone that teaches statistics deserves to sit.
I teach some of the internal courses on an informal basis here, so it doesn't really count, but even then, all I would personally do is make a histogram of rivet size in the steel in order to get some value from the obstructed view seating. That makes it sort of a strange win-win scenario for anyone who either teaches it or uses it extensively in their work.
That poor guy's seat is so bad that he doesn't even realize there's no game happening.
April 21st, 2014 at 10:46 PM ^
...but at least he is on an aisle. It'd be worse if it was in the middle of a section.
do you mean to tell me that if you're a dick to most of your fans some of them might not renew their tickets? i thought we had a business genius running the AD.
...and it looks like 2014 is the oddity vs it beginning a trend of crap home schedules in even years.
2016
Hawaii
UCF
Colorado
Wisconsin
Penn State
Illinois
Maryland
Indiana
2018
Arkansas
SMU
Nebraska
Maryland
Wisconsin
Penn State
Indiana
At least both of these years have Wisconsin added. Plus seeing Hawaii, UCF, and Colorado, and then Arkansas, SMU, and Nebraska, are lightyears better than this year's pathetic schedule.
I cannot believe we have so many years to wait before we play Nebraska again. Ugh.
These are not too bad... Missing rivalries sucks, but these schedules are at least ten times better than this season.
yeah those are all solid home slates, nothing exciting but no app state esque clearly underwhelming games
One of my favorite oxymorons.
Is that PSDs are not subject to Big Ten gate sharing policies where up to 40% of the gate is shared with the visiting Big Ten team.
That is verrrry interesting.... I did not know that.
So if Brandon did away with PSDs as a separate fee and just rolled the costs into the ticket prices, all of a sudden he has to share a bunch of that dough with Maryland or Indiana or whoever.
This is less of a factor now that media deals drive much of the revenue for FB but it still comes out to a $2-4M gain for a school like Purdue and Indiana - that number would balloon up if PSDs were removed entirely.
The other thing is that PSDs are tax-deductible, so rolling them into the regular ticket price would hit fans extra hard.
Is this because they're considered a university "donation"? Even if it's a required "donation"? This has all probably been covered before, but I must've been glossy-eyed when PSD's were last discussed in any great detail.
It's because you don't actually receive anything for the "donation," other than the "privilege" of purchasing tickets. For IRS purposes, the charitable deduction writeoff is 80% of the PSD. This is reflected on the donation receipt.
So what is stopping ticket prices of $0 or $1 and the "real" price being all in the PSD?
I mean if you were worried about the legality of scalping (I think in Michigan legally you can't sell for more that face value) couldn't you just say that they were not for resale?
Crappy Record + Crappy Schedule + Insane Pricing (relative to open market) = Lots and lots of ex-season ticket holders it would seem.
Go figure.
Interesting days ahead for Mr. Brandon
I wanna see the son of a bitch squirm.Pathetic you're allowed to post with that shot at Brandon.
With the $100 "donation" I'm coming up with $66.64 per ticket (math could be off). And that is a discounted rate for faculty/staff.
In the past, season ticket holders would overpay slightly for most games but could probably sell an OSU or ND ticket for a couple hundred bucks (or would have to pay that much to attend the game if they didn't already have a ticket). It seems the athletic department can't think of sacrificing that revenue, while failing to realize that it wasn't an even trade to begin with.
Tickets to see even a good Michigan team play App. State, Indiana, or Maryland probably weren't worth the $40 or whatever the season ticket holders were paying. They sure as shit aren't worth $70, and now there is no OSU/ND game to make up for it (and no, Arkansas or Colorado is not the same thing).
I've never understood the mentality of selling off the only good games so that you can attend the shit games for free (Not saying you endorse it.) In the past, people would always suggest I sell one of those games to pay for the season. But if you aren't attending those games, why are you buying season tickets?
I did just the opposite a few times and flew in for one big game a year. Thought about getting season tickets and selling the other games but never wanted to deal with it.
I think the athletic department saw the rise of StubHub and Ebay as venues to move tickets and folks were getting big money for those games so someone thought they were missing out on big bucks, when in reality they were basically charging the market rate for the season as a whole (flexible online sales just showed that some tickets were worth a lot and some worth very little).
So instead of selling a $200 OSU/ND ticket for $50 (even in the old days they were premium priced) and a $10-20 App. State ticket for $40, they are trying to get more for the shitty games and not offering an OSU/ND ticket in even years going forward.
I think it's a forced reality caused by the athletic departpment taking the wrong lesson from the stubhub economy (well not wrong in a pure profit driven stance, but wrong from a perspective of doing what's best for your fans). It's pretty clear that the athletic department saw what tickets were going for on stubhub and took the lesson that for big games, they could charge a lot more, and similarly, season tickets were undervalued because those big games were worth so much. But what they failed to notice (or ignored) was the plummeting prices of the lesser games. By increasing prices so that the secondary market couldn't support the lesser game prices it's forced season ticket holders to either stomach a higher and higher cost for good games (higher season ticket prices plus a lower ability to recoup costs by selling lesser game tickets) or ultimately sell tickets to more attractive games. The pull of owning season tickets is obviously still strong, but the economic realities can't be ignored. This has put more and more tickets for good games on the secondary market, and ultimately led to more and more enemy colors in the stadium.
Eventually season ticket holders that buy for only the "good" games are going to be an extreme minority of the season ticket holders.
They can dress it up any way they want - discounted PSDs or whatever - bottom line is it's a hefty price for this schedule. It's going to get dicey if they have to really start discounting somehow to move them all when people have already paid top dollar. These are just baby steps so far that can be rationalized - only for faculty/staff etc. If it hits the general public there will be major grumbling.