Piggy backing off of the "Season Ticket Holder Survey" thread, and since TCU only allowed 50 character responses, I've decided to discuss my concerns here. Everyone clearly has their own personal preferences regarding things such as what music is played, how loud it's played, how the team enters the field, what chants we do, who leads the chants, etc. But at the end of the day, most of these things are fairly irrelevant to the ultimate game day atmosphere and home field advantage we have (well don't have at this point).
What really matters at the end of the day (outside of winning) is getting butts in seats, and more specifically getting purple butts in our
best seats. The seats between the 20s and closest to the field (both on the west and east side) are consistently way too empty or full of opposing teams' colors. Far too many of our stadium's best seats (not including the club seats and suites) are controlled by people that don't regularly use them. There are many reasons for this. Many donors control more seats than they need or can use. They have seats elsewhere in the stadium that leave their extra seats unused, given to friends or clients who end up being casual attendees (non TCU loyal fans that probably show up late, barely cheer, and leave early), or getting sold on the secondary market (often winding up in the hands of fans for the opposing team).
Yes, attendance is a problem across the country, as is stubhub reselling, and schools with smaller fan bases such as ourselves are much quicker to notice the consequences (especially during down years when the team isn't very good). But this is not an acceptable excuse for what causes, in my opinion, the biggest contributor to our stadium's home field advantage that has all but disappeared.
Just like every other school in the country, we have a core and loyal part of our fan base that consistently attends games. But rather than these people sitting in unison in our stadium's best seats providing some kind of coherent home field advantage, they are scattered throughout the stadium, a lot of them in the 400 seats or sitting on the east side only to look down and see better seats that have never been available during the upgrade process that are either empty or occupied by away fans game after game after game. It's extremely disheartening, severely fractures our fan base's unity, and is ultimately causing more and more people to reconsider whether they want to renew their season tickets.
There are no easy fixes, but I do think we've reached the point where more drastic measures need to be taken.
To TCU's credit, they did make a subtle step in the right direction by limiting how many seats could be upgraded this past off-season at 8 per account. Their logic was that there are very few accounts with more than 8 seats that get consistently used. According to someone I spoke with, most accounts with more than 8 seats typically have the extras going unused or being resold on stubhub. TCU's hope was to help level the playing field and prevent someone with 40 seats (most of them for reselling) upgrading all their seats before someone with 2 seats had the chance to upgrade theirs.
I totally agree with and appreciate this step forward, but this exact thing had been allowed for years, so unfortunately a lot of the damage has been done. For years people have been hoarding tickets to resell and upgrading their extra seats ahead of actual season ticket holders that intend to use their seats. Not being able to upgrade more than 8 seats last year doesn't change the fact that many really good seats are already controlled for the sole purpose of reselling.
As I previously stated, this creates a severe fracture in our stadium and is the primary reason, outside of the west side club, that it's almost impossible to find seats where you're not surrounded by opposing fans. I sit in row J, Section 234 (this is the 50 yard line for those that don't know off the top of their head) and there are seats next to me, in front of me, and behind me that are sold to away fans every single game. Seats that real TCU season ticket holders don't have access to, because they are controlled by someone that just resells them on stubhub.
TCU naturally hesitates to take any steps that are too drastic, because they know this will reduce the number of season tickets sold, a number that is already on the decline. But I also don't think they fully appreciate the number of people deciding not to renew their season tickets because of this exact problem that they are failing to legitimately address. It's simply not fun to attend a home game for your school and constantly be surrounded by opposing fans (especially when you have to deal with fans from schools like Tech, OU, Baylor, Texas etc.).
Here are practical solutions I think TCU needs to take to address these issues:
- Start reaching out to season ticket accounts that are consistently reselling tickets on the secondary market, especially the seats that are resold for every game. TCU has tracked this activity for years, and they know every time a ticket is resold on stubhub. They just haven't done anything about it yet. Notify these accounts that if this activity continues, TCU has the right to revoke those seats from their account. This is not a novel idea, and it's been done across the country at school's where good seats were consistently being resold rather than sat it. It should be TCU's duty to ensure that our best seats are being sat in by TCU fans. Up to this point, TCU has not done that.
- Put a ceiling on the amount of priority points you can earn per season ticket per year at 8 seats. As I was told by an employee at TCU, there are very few accounts that actively use more than 8 seats. The accounts that actually need more than that will continue to buy them, but otherwise, stop incentivizing people with priority points to buy an excessive number of extra seats just to resell.
- Stop promoting Stubhub reselling. As it stands now, TCU literally has stubhub integrated into our online accounts. You can login to your TCU gofrogs account and automatically list all of your seats at the click of a button. Jeremy Donati has stated that he doesn't like tickets being resold on stubhub. If this is the case, why make it so easy to resell them? And even worse, why send season ticket holders emails promoting the ability to resell them on stubhub?
- Lastly, something has to be done about our west side lower bowl. In its current state, it is an absolute joke. The seats and rows are way too far apart. That entire section needs to be reconfigured and resat. You could easily fit 2/3 more seat back chairs in that section than what exist now. We cannot continue to allow the section immediately behind our team bench to be so sparsely attended and void of any energy. It is terribly embarrassing and has a direct impact on recruiting and our team's energy level.
I know this is long and I know there will be smart ass comments. But I genuinely think these are practical steps that would help dramatically improve our game day atmosphere and home field advantage.
#MakeTheCarterGreatAgain