Of course, a few years ago, a “huge” audience 28 million watched the annual Alabama-Clemson game, which is about 11% of the 247 million over the age of 18 in the US of A. Hooray for the NCAA! But, it seems there are a lot of fans that are unhappy! The games is getting stale! The price of tickets is slumping!
So, ticket prices on the secondary market for Monday’s college football national title game are cratering – get-in prices hit $150 Tuesday on StubHub and experts say it should continue to drop. By comparison, last year’s get-in price peaked at about $1,700. There are only 612 billionaires in America. Maybe we need more. But, of course, there are plenty of people worth $20 million and above. They all love a football game and would surely want to travel to San Jose and pay another $5k for their flights and rooms, plus “eats!”
Has the country really gone mad? Who in heaven’s name cares what the price of these tickets are? The real question is why are these schools in the Pro Football business and why are their coaches getting paid multi-millions? Are these “bread and circus” games indicative of a society which has no clue over priorities? It doesn’t!
So, the game is not that interesting. “Prices are trending lower than we have ever seen before,” SeatGeek.com’s Chris Leyden told Yahoo Sports. “Demand is down.” And that’s just part of it. The semifinal games weren’t competitive and delivered comparatively low television ratings. About the only thing that remained steady was complaints about the selection committee.
A year ago Alabama and Georgia conveniently met in Atlanta and the average ticket price on SeatGeek hit a whopping $3,046, nearly two-and-a-half times the $1,262 average the year before for Alabama-Clemson in Tampa, Florida.
Proximity to the fan bases was everything. Any money not spent on travel can be spent on tickets. If Atlanta hosted again this year, ticket prices would be high. This year’s current average, as of Tuesday afternoon, was a respectable $1,043, but that won’t last as prices are plummeting. “Tickets sold in the past 24 hours have gone for an average of just $533 each,” Leyden said.
Levi’s Stadium happens to sit on the other side of the country from the participating clubs. Travel costs just to get to San Jose are considerable – $1,000 flights are the minimum from the Southeast. It doesn’t help that neither Alabama nor South Carolina have major airports – the old joke in Alabama is you can’t even get to heaven without connecting through Atlanta.
So who are people paying these kind of “bucks” for this game? Why should these athletes be playing 14-15 games per year, getting nothing out of their so-called education and hardly learning anything? How can these folks even hope to have the energy to go to class? All they do is eat in athlete’s dormitory and go to the weight room. And, if they get a degree? Is it worth the paper it is written on? But, of course, they are not at these Division I schools for education, not in the least. They are in the NFL’s minor league, and they hope to survive 4-5 (red shirted) years in college and get a chance at the so-called millions in the NFL. Does anyone care that injured players have, in most cases, lose their scholarships, and in the NFL, few contracts are guaranteed! Let the good times roll until, if they survive 5-6 years in the NFL, and get to age 55 or so, CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) starts to affect their future. Of course to many this is a myth, like “Climate Change,” but in hundreds of layers affected, who have died and had their brains diagnosed, only 99% had CTE.
Just remember, the Poobahs of College football, the networks, the conferences, the uniform and sneaker companies, know the cure! It is an easy solution. Their answer is expand the playoffs from 4 to 8 teams. And, if that doesn’t work include all the conference champions. Maybe 16 teams should be in the field. That would mean instead of three games, fifteen games. So the teams in the finals would play into February. So what! They don’t go to classes anyway! Let the good times roll.