[NU Sports] Saturdays at Dyche Stadium

[MHRJGScott at aol.com]

Why don't we make up some excuse about mold or asbestos and having to  
renovate Dyche for a couple years and move to Wrigley. No worries about  
conflicts with post season baseball, and it may be a marketing ploy that would  
work.
 
Peace  















































and  Love  

 
In a message dated 10/6/2009 6:04:42 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
jleonard518 at yahoo.com writes:

A new  stadium is too much to hope for in the next 15-20 years, but it sure 
would be  nice. A lakefront stadium would be a beautiful setting for game 
days, but I  don't think it makes the traffic/commuting issues any easier. 

Here are  a few things that I think we could potentially do in the short 
term:

1)  Cut a deal where the Metra is free if you're holding a game ticket. 
Metra's  incremental cost is zero, so there has to be some opportunity.

2) Have  a family section where families can bring in there own food and 
beverages.  Given that a movie is $10, you might get a family to pay $15 for a 
child's  ticket (though Julie's point is well taken), but then when you hit 
them up for  $3.50 for bottled water, that's where the budget for the day 
is blown.  

3) I've wondered about the NCAA policy on alcohol so I'm not 100% sure  you 
could do this one. The NCAA doesn't allow you to sell beer, but (at least  
in the high dollar suites) it can be provided. I wonder if they could take  
those really bad seats by the scoreboard in the north end zone and designate 
 it 'The Big Ten's Beer Garden'. You'd have to wall it off so that the 
drinkers  don't mingle with the crowd, but perhaps you could give away (included 
with  the ticket price) 3 pints of purple beer to fans sitting in that  
section.

4) Changing the game times should be investigated. In the age  of the Big 
Ten Network there doesn't seem to be a reason that we hold  ourselves to the 
ESPN mandate of 11 AM kickoffs. 

5) I believe in the  general principles of free market economics, so if the 
seats don't sell at  $25-$35 then the price needs to come down. The 
faithful out there will pay, so  you don't need to cut the price across the board. 
But, you could leave a  designated section (hell, the whole south endzone) 
and do an online auction  that starts 30 hours before each kickoff. Start 
with $20 per seat and drop the  price $.50 per hour until 9 AM on game day. If 
that brings potential new fans  in at $4 a ticket, it's better than an empty 
seat. 

6) Another idea  would be to actually reduce the number of seats. The seats 
in the south  endzone are horrible anyway. You could tear them down and 
bring the available  seats from say 49,000 to 40,000. I realize that you'd 
leave some money on the  table when a gauranteed sellout (like a 9-0 tOSU team) 
comes to town, but it  would save all those embarrassing TV shots of field 
goals into empty seats.  Colorado and Oregon have smaller stadiums than Dyche 
and they have managed to  develop a better atmosphere. 

6a) If you did remove the south end zone  seats, as a NUMBAlum I can at 
least dream of a bandshell constructed in the  south endzone. Put NUMB down 
there and let the entire stadium hear the fight  songs. That would have a 
tremendous impact on the game day experience.  


Go Cats!
Jim





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