Bowl Ticket Sales

A few days ago ESPN ran an interesting article about bowl ticket sales. Which teams are under performing and which teams are exceeding expectations for ticket sales. Tony Barnhart at the AJC followed up with a similar article focused mostly on how the ACC teams are doing with their allotment.

Here's a summary of those articles and some thoughts...


Exceeding Expectations:
- BYU: Sold most of the 40k tickets to the Las Vegas Bowl. 150,000 Mormons in the Las Vegas area made sure this game was a sellout. "Sin City" was settled by Mormons, who came to Las Vegas to mine lead for the bullets they thought they would need to fight the U.S. government." (source: USNews). How's that for an obscure fact today?

- Navy: Sold 20k tickets to the Poinsetta Bowl. A huge Naval Base in San Diego doesn't hurt.

- Georgia Tech: Sold 6k tickets to Emerald Bowl, which is tremendously more than anyone thought that they would buy. HOWEVER, look closer at the numbers. 5,600 of the tickets were donated to "local organizations in San Francisco, including Special Olympics, Pop Warner Youth Football and military in the Bay Area." That means only 400 Tech fans will be travelling to the game. (hat tip to GTSports for the link). In order to get fans to buy the tickets, their Athletic Department gave ticket buyer's two AT points for each purchased ticket. For UGA fans reading this, that's the equivalent of UGA giving us 200 GEEF points for buying tickets. So should GT be listed in both exceeding and disappointing? Who knows.

Most Disappointing:
- Nevada: Sold 100 tickets to Hawaii Bowl. Can't blame them. I don't think UGA sent 500 down there.

- Missouri: Sold 2,500 tickets to Independence Bowl. For a team that rarely bowls, you'd think that they would send SOME fans to this thing.

- Virginia: Sold less than 4,500 tickets despite promising Music City Bowl that it would sell 10-15k. Given that UVA was selected out of order by this bowl, this is probably the biggest disappointment of the bowl season.

- Wisconsin: Sold 8k to Capital One Bowl desipte having never been to what is generally considered the #1 non-BCS bowl. I don't buy the Hawaii game excuse listed in ESPN.

- Michigan: Sold 6k tickets to the Alamo Bowl.

- South Carolina: Sold 4,500 tickets less than its allotment to the Independence Bowl. FINALLY the myth that they will travel anywhere is exposed.


It will be interesting to see how the sale or non-sale of tickets to bowls by teams that traditionally travel well will impact their future bowl slots.

Hat tip to Dawg22 on The Porch for showing me the first link on this thread. If anyone has links to info on how WVU fans are travelling to this year's Sugar, let me know.

pwd

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