This weekend formally begins the college football season. Modern day realignment, NIL (name, image and likeness) and the transfer portal have put a damper on what I love about college football, but I’m still a sucker for the pageantry and history of the game.
Week after week, I’ll watch stadiums big and small full of fans watching their favorite team eke out a huge win or endure a potential season ending loss. Many of the stadiums have 100K fans, some of them seated in luxury boxes or enjoying any number of tailgate areas outside the stadium costing thousands of dollars each season.
There’s always going to be the “upper crust” of society that spends their money on luxury items. I’m reminded of the lawyer from the movie (and book) “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” The lawyer mentions he’s a huge Georgia fan and attends all the games. This makes sense. He’s a lawyer, he’d be able to afford it without much issue.
My question is: how is the average fan able to attend these games?
Since I live in South Carolina, we’ll use Clemson as our example. According to Statistica, the average ticket price to attend a Clemson game in 2023 was $382. This may be inflated to include the price of luxury boxes; however, even if it was half that it would still be very expensive to attend the game in person.
This is the price of the ticket, it doesn’t include parking and food/drinks for tailgating, etc. If you were to take a family of four to a big game, you can expect to pay upwards of $1,000 or more. NFL games wouldn’t be much cheaper, with an average price of $377 in 2023 according to USA Today.
When I was in my 20’s, I lived in Charlotte with various friends and roommates. At the time, the original iteration of the Hornets were in the process of relocating to New Orleans and the Panthers were in a similar slump to the one they’re in now. Due to the fact that one team was skipping town and another was flat out awful to watch, ticket prices were at rock bottom. I routinely watched several Hornets and Panthers games without spending more than $10 each time for a ticket.
How times have changed.
No matter how bad a team is, it’s almost never reflected in ticket prices anymore. Last year, I had several friends post Panthers tickets for sale on Facebook. I don’t remember the exact price, but I can tell you it was closer to $100 per ticket than $10. The Panthers finished 2-15 last year. Not exactly a must watch sporting event.
Bloated salaries, increased TV revenue and the legalization of gambling have only made it more difficult for the average fan to watch their favorite team live rather than at home. You’d have thought it would be the other way around.
Sports are meant to be a way of providing comfort, excitement and connectivity to the community. There’s no better way to do this than to witness the sporting event live, preferably with a loved one so you can both enjoy the experience.
There is some good news. TVs are relatively cheap. You have the ability to buy 2-3 of them and watch multiple games at once in the comfort of your own home. This is nice of course, but it’s sad to think that an era of affordable live sports has passed us by along with many other things.
Perhaps I should just expand the sports I’d like to see live.
US Open Pickleball Championship anyone?
