Thanks for the link.

Here is where I sit on it...

There seem to be a lot of people who say - the demand dictates what the tickets are worth, and it is likely at least what they are now charging if not more - and so people should just shut up about it, or that this is a non issue.

The thing is, they are probably correct as far as the market forces - winning has a way of helping with that... but that doesn't discount the larger issue of *how* this particular situation was handled. Greg McGarity is easy to dislike... hell, I'll go as far as to say MOST AD's are easy to dislike. Almost any decision they make (or don't make) is under scrutiny. With that said, the quote that stuck out to me from the article was this:

quote:
I don’t think there was anything that we did that was in a dishonest way. Our goal was just to be fully transparent with everyone. We presented it as best we could with the information that was solid and indisputable. The other was just so complex that I don’t know how you get your hands around that. Everyone knows the Hartman Fund was in play. It wasn’t a situation where we were trying to run away from anything at all. It was just strictly focused on the face value of the tickets.

I'll call bullshite on that one. Complexity aside, the *goal* was to position the data in such a way that it supported the decision that you made. It's not uncommon, nor is it even terribly wrong... but when you get called to the carpet on it, you do have to own it to some degree. Otherwise you most definitely appear to be in a situation where you are "trying to run away from (something)".

And... opting to increase the ticket prices in the upcoming season *after* you've made significant pushes to get donations does come across as dishonest. There is a near zero percent chance that they were unaware of what the upcoming year's operating budget was going to look like... they only have a few levers to pull to alter... cut spending, or increase revenues... and Football Tickets are an easy target to increase revenues on.

Preaching to the choir here I'm sure on the above, but just find it comical that people think that the discussion isn't warranted simply because they think the tickets are worth it. The level of condescension coming from McGarity and BM towards fans who balked not necessarily at the price but the way it was handled is just incredible. They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by pushing the ticket price increases to 2019, which would have taken away the "dishonesty" aspect of it all (short of maybe the intellectual dishonesty in how they presented the data - "When one avoids an honest, deliberate and comprehensive approach to a matter because it may introduce an adverse effect on personally and professionally held views and beliefs. Intellectual dishonesty is a failure to apply standards of rational evaluation that one is aware of, usually in a self-serving fashion.").

For the love of all things holy, please just let his contract expire in 2019... please.