I wonder how much screaming there would be if tickets to UCONN/Florida were sold at $100/each and tickets to Maine were sold for $5. I'm sure you'd end up with empty seats at the Florida game and while you'd "sell" a lot of tickets to the Maine game people wouldn't show up for it. People don't show up for Towson even though they paid full price for it. There is a "clearing" price for every game in order to sell every ticket. The "season ticket" price is meant to maximize $ / sales over the course of a season, so EVERY game is mispriced on its own. I bought my season tickets KNOWING I wouldn't go to half of the BB games, and I do my best to give them up or sell them to other people at cost. But two years ago when I didn't, I felt like an idiot because I ended up having to pay $120 for a ticket to the Cuse Gameday game (of course I didn't "have to" but I really wanted to go).
I agree with Whaler theoretically on this, but season tickets for football (and hoops) usually come in groups (meaning that it isn't usually 2 guys paying for their own seats, but rather couples / families buying a pair or more).
So when someone looks at 6 (or 7) $25/game = $150 a seat (or $300/pair). Good seats add $100/season for donation. Even more for chairbacks. So if I'm looking at a pair of tickets (assume that I'm price sensitive so I forgo donation seats), I'm looking at $300 for a pair. At $20/game, I'm looking at $240/pair. For people that are really price sensitive, does $240/pair v. $300/pair mean anything? Unless you don't tailgate AND you don't eat inside, the ticket price is the least expensive part of the day.
I think it is pretty simple. When HCRE was here, the ONLY games we lost at home were against high-value teams (WVU, GT, etc) which had a good draw regardless. Not only did you have a great opportunity to party, you also were nearly always assured a win (or a good game - or at least if you lost you were expecting it). The air went out of the party with HCRE's departure, and the inability of PP to win games. Now it is just a party with some football for those that actually care.
As to the math - 10% of the seats are chairback - so 36,000 seats are at $25/game. Total take of $900,000 / game if you sell them out (ignoring the donations). If we have 30,000 season tickets sold, assume the chairbacks are sold (which I know they aren't completely) and we have sold 26,000 season tickets (bleacher) at $25/game. Season ticket take at $650,000/game. If you dropped the tickets to $18.05/game, you'd have to sell ALL 36,000 of them to make up for the discount. And I don't think that we sell out at $18/game either. So when people talk about dropping prices, the price that you'd have to drop them to in order to guarantee a sell-out (probably $10/ticket) means you are giving up a ton of revenue in order to fill the stadium. And while you would sell more tickets, people are very unlikely to come to a December game v. Memphis just because they bought a $10 ticket in March/April. The money is already spent. The gate would be the same either way. And nobody would bother trying to resell a ticket they bought for $10.
The vast majority of the people making season ticket decisions are making them on a binary basis within reason. You will always gain/lose people at the margins, but at the end of the day it comes down to:
Winning = Demand
The rest is just noise.
