I'm sure it is at Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee in our league.

Those arenas have suites and seat at least 15,000 fans.

The average basketball arena for major conferences I bet, is only around 10,500 seats.

So you're talking around 7-8 home games to be able to match normal SEC home football game attendance. Then, your tickets are about 30-50 dollars cheaper.

Right now, all your big time conference donors are pumping money into football, not basketball at these schools.

Take Arkansas for example....as nice as our arena is, we are the very last SEC basketball program that doesn't have a practice facility. Why? Money was put in the football operations center.....and we even started building a baseball indoor facility before even breaking ground on the basketball facility two months ago.

Why is that? Donors.....we have more money than God at our disposal here, but the big donors want it to go with football.

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Posted by Mizzeaux

Worshington

Member since Jun 2012

13894 posts

Posted on 4/17/14 at 9:50 pm to Hawgeye

quote:
I'm sure it is at Kentucky, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee in our league.

I get what you're saying. Tickets and concessions are important, and they are. I wasn't trying to dismiss their importance. I'm just saying they pale in comparison to football. The vast majority of revenue comes from football, there is no debating that. TV contracts, sponsorships, etc.

Basketball has the fan support to make it a profit center, for sure. I'm just saying that it doesn't necessarily need to make money when you're in a football conference. Run the thing at a deficit, pay the coach plenty to get the guys in that people will watch and home game revenue will go up and subsidize the program and take the burden off football revenue.

All I'm saying is that from a guy with a marketing background, keeping Mizzou (or whatever school) relevant for the entire season and basically doubling the number of days your school is in the news is more important for sales and brand recognition.

That's it.

I don't care if basketball makes money, because even if it does, it pales in comparison to football. The additional revenues from licensing and the like will bring additional money in to support non revenue sports.

ETA: I'm drunk and I'm the only one here.

Hopefully someday a school will see this in the future and offer me a job as an associate AD because I'm so fricking groundbreaking.