re: Auburn's athletic dept. operated at a deficit of $866,000 last year'

This AU blogger isn't too happy...

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While the nominal premise of the story is the difficulty of turning a profit in big-time college football, the underlying notion, that there are dozens (or hundreds!) of unsold prime seats in Jordan-Hare Stadium for any game, forget the biggest games of the year, stinks to high heaven. Everything in the lower bowl has been officially sold out to season ticket holders or visitor allotments for decades.

Even in "bad" years, the only unsold seats in that stadium should be in the upper corners of the decks, or from unsold visitor seats (the latter of which doesn't exist for any UGA or Alabama game). If somebody between the 30's dropped their tickets because of a bad year (or any other reason), all that should have caused is a ripple of people with lower priority than them moving over to take those seats. Under no circumstances should they be showing up as "unsold," especially after the season starts.

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And that doesn't even touch on the Athletic Director's lake-house buddy getting the option to buy 60 face-value tickets to the Oregon BCS game in 2010 (market value well into the six figures) or 118 extra Georgia and 62 extra Alabama tickets in 2013... that's way beyond the pale. A lot of people who read this jumped through a great many hoops and paid a great many dollars just to get one or two tickets to those games.

They deserve a much better explanation than, "Well shucks, this was just a good way to keep opposing fans from getting them.

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What's the issue then? The athletic department not allowing scalpers to buy tickets for premium seats? Either way, they call on the donors because they need quick turnaround.

I'm not saying there is a problem but as someone posted above if you are going to do something like move large chunks of tickets without offering them at face value to the public you should probably make sure it is pretty transparent. Giving someone 20 tickets at face for one of the most expensive games of the year presents some series arms length transaction questions due to the possibility of quick sales to scalper a by those donors for their own gain, not to mention not allowing auburn donors outside of a group of 15 mega donors an opportunity.

It's just a small town good ole boy way of doing things, not a large corporation way. And SEC athletic departments should operate like Fortune 500s. That's all really.

Yea - but the job of the AD is to disclose things like that and have structure in place to point to to show they have a reliable system they use to deal with situations like this. It takes assumption out of the equation. That's how big business (and their control systems) work.

You don't just on the fly decide "gaw dang don't want a bunch of bammers in here quick call the donors and sell these 1,000 tickets".

Just not a good look and not good processes for an organization dealing with this much (donated) money.

How does Alabama handle things like that then?

I have no idea how Alabama handles it.

My hope is they have a control system in place that lays out the process for unused tickets for every game. Based on my knowledge, I believe they put unused tickets on our website for public sale. My hope would be this is consistently done whether it's Western Carolina or Auburn. If not, it needs to be changed.

Lack of consistent controls and systems is what leads to people taking advantage and causing fraud. Accounting/Financial Systems and Controls 101.

Yes, and if they don't sell them they sell them at the gate before the game. And if that doesn't sell them you eat the cost.

Again, this is a Fortune 500 company, not a local hardware store. You don't just randomly make things up as you go along.

However, the Auburn people quoted made it clear this wasn't ability inability to sell the tickets, it was about a fear that a public sale would put them in the hands of scalpers and/or UA/UGA people, which also meant it kept them out of the hands of non-1% AU people.