Why did Florida State receive so few bowl tickets?

There was a day when Florida State and Oklahoma would have each been allocated and required to sell 15,000 or more seats to the Cheez-It Bowl. If you are a Florida State fan who didn’t get the number of tickets you requested, you are asking yourself why did the Cheez-It Bowl allocate only 4,800 tickets to Florida State and to Oklahoma?

In a broader context why did bowls reduce their allocation to as few as 3,000? Even New Year’s Six bowls like the Orange Bowl have reduced allocations from 17,000 to 13,000.

We talked to representatives from Florida State, the Atlantic Coast Conference office and bowl representatives to answer the question. There’s a simple answer: After decades of unsold bowl tickets stacking up in athletic ticket offices, the schools, conferences and bowls agreed to reduce the ticket allocations to schools.

Florida State athletics director Michael Alford has seen both sides of the bowl ticket issue, years where prominent schools were left with thousands of unsold tickets and years like this where FSU was not provided with enough tickets to fill 13,000 ticket requests from fired-up Seminole fans.

“The lowered allocation is impacting our fans adversely this year because of the excitement around the program and the location of the bowl, but overall lowering the allocation is good for the university and for college athletics,” Alford said.

“This is a more-efficient way for the bowls to sell the tickets, which generates more revenue to the conferences, and therefore more revenue to the schools,” Alford said, noting that FSU and other schools must adapt to the changing landscape and communicate those changes to donors and fans.

“The landscape began to change six or eight years ago,” Florida Citrus Sports (FCS) CEO Steve Hogan said. “The allocation used to be 12,500 to 15,000 tickets.”

Florida State hasn't been to a high-demand bowl since they beat Michigan in the Orange Bowl way back in 2016 and, like Rip Van Winkle, has woken up in a whole new world where the bowls are taking responsibility for filling empty seats and the secondary market has become a major factor.

“We wanted to provide the schools with (a ticket allocation) that was more manageable plus fans have become sophisticated about the secondary marketplace,” said Hogan, who is a Past Chairman of the Football Bowl Association. “From the day the bowls are announced, the schools have a short turnaround to allocate tickets. Every school is different but no matter how they do it, there is some sort of delay. The pace by which other fans want to buy tickets is much faster. As soon as the bowl is announced, fans won’t wait, they go to the market and buy the number of seats in the locations they want.”

FCS hosts two bowl games, the Cheez-It Bowl on Dec. 29 and the Cheez-It Citrus Bowl on Jan. 2, so they have contracts with four conferences: the ACC, Big 12, SEC and Big Ten.

“Each conference is different but we’re all heading there together,” Hogan said. “The SEC went to (reduced allocation) earlier and they have the same-size block as the ACC.”

Demand is fickle everywhere and depends on three factors, Hogan said: season results, proximity to bowl and the matchup. “Forty-five hundred tickets works internally for schools, except with Florida State this season you have the Easter Sunday effect,” Hogan said, noting churches aren’t built for the largest congregation of the year. “FSU has had an exciting season, it is in this market and the matchup is Oklahoma, so this is a big demand game. Most every other year, 4,800 seats – 4,300 for internal needs and 500 for the band – would be enough for any school. Florida State knew demand would be high, so we worked with them quickly to get 2,500 more. It was still not enough but more than what other ACC schools would have needed or received.”

The FSU ticket office managed to find another 900 tickets, raising its supply to 8,200 with a demand for 13,000.

While Florida Citrus Sports hosts Florida State vs. LSU in this very stadium next Labor Day Weekend, Hogan said: “We want Seminole fans to know we will have many, many more, tickets allocated to the schools – virtually half the stadium for LSU and half for Florida State.”

Instead of looking to the schools to sell large block of seats, the bowls are now taking responsibility for selling more on their own with year-round sales teams and in the secondary markets.

The new system, where schools get fewer tickets, generates more ticket revenue for the bowls, which means more money for the conferences and thus their schools but where does the new distribution model leave the fan, many of whom still are coming to the school to purchase their tickets.

Many FSU fans had already found their way to the secondary market but schools must now communicate and direct their fans to look to the secondary market sooner. When Florida State sent out the initial bowl ticket request, before the bowls were announced, it included this message printed in large bold letters on the email:

Important note - Due to the high demand for this game and limited ticket allotment from the bowl, ticket requests may be limited in quantity or unfulfilled if demand exceeds supply. The FSU ticket priority policy will be used to determine ticket fulfillment.

After the donor’s request was received, the ticket office sent out an acknowledgement email with the same words printed in a similarly prominent manner.

For some, the message was heard loud and clear. They went to the secondary market at fair market prices and were able to pick up endzone seats for $70 to $100 each with incrementally higher prices along the sidelines.

Unfortunately for many Seminole Booster members, the message was not clear and by the time they went to the market, there were fewer seats available with those same endzone seats now selling for $193 or more.

“A lot of people went into the market within the first 48 hours and got what they wanted, probably 14,000 tickets overnight,” Hogan said, explaining why the prices rose.

“You want (the ticket buying experience) to be good for the school and for the fan but obviously the market drives it,” Hogan said. “It’s an education process for the schools and for the fans. The learning experience on both ends is sharpening. In five years, fans will just get them quicker through the secondary market.”

So what happened?

All too often, including here at Florida State, schools were unable to sell the seats they were required to sell to their fans, which cost the schools, conferences and bowls tens of millions of dollars in ticket revenue, not to mention stadiums with seas of empty bowl seats.

While the Cheez-It Bowl was a quick sellout for FSU, imagine how many tickets FSU might have been stuck with had they been invited to the Duke’s Mayo Bowl in Charlotte or to the Holiday Bowl in San Diego?

“If we’d been invited there, our fan base would likely have bought 5,000 but if we were required to sell 15,000 tickets, like in the old days, we’d be sucking air,” an FSU administrator said.

Fortunately for the teams invited to Charlotte, the Duke’s Mayo Bowl requires only 5,000 tickets, with the bowl’s sales reps selling the rest into the local or secondary market.

One athletic director put it this way, “The huge allocations the bowls were requiring us to take were killing us.”

In an article written 10 years ago in Athletic Business, Paul Steinbeck wrote about the plight of schools, including Nebraska, who following a successful season was invited to the Holiday Bowl. Good deal, except the Huskers had played in San Diego earlier that year. The Huskers were left with 2,900 unsold tickets in spite of Husker promotions to buy a ticket for a serviceman, a tactic FSU has used to sell tickets.

Steinbeck detailed the losses sustained by Virginia Tech in 2011, when it won the ACC and found itself with $1.77 million in unsold inventory, selling only 11,000 of its 17,500-ticket allotment.

Virginia Tech found itself competing against its own authorized secondary marketplace – Stubhub – when Orange Bowl patrons and sponsors dumped their sideline seats for $20, while the VT ticket office was trying to sell end zone seats for $200.

FSU faced a similar situation the very next year when it won the ACC title and an Orange Bowl matchup with Northern Illinois. All was well except for the opponent. FSU could have sold a lot more tickets, even at $200 each, if the opponent had been more desirable.

Even before FSU sent requests for those OB tickets, patrons and sponsors of the OB were dumping sideline seats into the secondary market for $50 or less. Florida State and the ACC was on the hook for $3 million, many of which were in the end zone with a face value of $200.

FSU instinctively knew its tickets wouldn’t sell at $200, so FSU and the ACC agreed to price them at BOGO prices in hopes of recovering as much of the $3 million as possible. As untenable as it was for Florida State and the ACC, imagine what it was for Northern Illinois.

Sales for FSU’s recent bowl trips, to El Paso and Shreveport didn’t meet the guarantee, which had become increasingly common for bowl games.

This year’s Cheez-It bowl is a good example. FSU fans are excited about the 2022 team’s 9-3 record, with wins over UM and UF, and a central Florida bowl so sales were great. On the other hand, demand at Oklahoma was not good. The Sooners suffered through a disappointing 6-6 season and Orlando is a hike from Norman, so OU opened sales to the general public, including crafty FSU fans.

The bowls also used to allocate the end zone seats to the schools, which drove many fans to the secondary market. "That is an issue that I and my colleagues, other athletic directors, have been fighting for the last couple of years," then-Virginia Tech athletic director Jim Weaver told The Virginian-Pilot. "We could sell more of our tickets if we had better tickets to sell."

The lower allocations today are better with fewer end zone seats.

Back then, the ACC held its schools responsible for the first 6,000 tickets, partially responsible for the next 2,000 and harmless for any unsold tickets beyond that. The Pac-10 and Big 12 covered the cost of unsold bowl tickets, while the Big East paid its BCS rep $2 million but did not share in ticket losses.

"Something has to change,” CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell wrote. “Schools have to say enough is enough. This system is broken, and we can't do it anymore. But while athletic directors complain and complain, no one has stepped up."

That was in 2010. It only took a few more years before athletic directors complained and the conferences and the bowl’s stepped up.

The athletic directors talked and brought it to the conference office for further discussion and eventually an agreement was reached with the bowls.

“Reducing the number of seats the bowls require the schools to sell was bantered about four or five years ago,” an associate athletic director said. “The athletic directors agreed the allocations were too large, so they went to the conference offices and the conferences listened and renegotiated the number of tickets the schools were required to sell.”

The ADs also asked for sideline seats, fewer in the end zone, and the conferences and bowls obliged.

That’s how it’s supposed to work, right? The schools respond to fan demand. The conferences respond to the schools. And the bowls respond to the conference offices.

“The bowls were willing partners,” a bowl rep said. “The bowls wanted to build out their local sales staffs so they could sell into their local market throughout the year. And the bowls knew the power of the secondary market.”

The conference office wanted to be sure the schools have enough seats to take care of the majority of their donors in most years yet be mindful of the bowl’s needs too.

“The best kind of partnerships are those that work for all parties, the schools, their donors, the conference and our bowl partners,” an Atlantic Coast Conference official said.

With a ticket supply just over 8,200, the ticket office had to fulfill the needs of its Seminole Booster members plus contractual needs of various entities within the university, which can exceed 2,500 tickets.

The Marching Chiefs for example require 500 lower-level seats. FSU students receive 10 percent of the bowl allocation, or 480 seats. The NCAA mandates that each football player who travels to the bowl should receive up to six tickets for their family and guests. Since the bowl is close, Mike Norvell will reward the entire team, including walk-ons, so the ticket office must reserve 720 for their potential needs. The football staff is also allocated tickets for their family and guests. Athletics employees have the right to purchase tickets. FSU’s marketing rights holder is allocated tickets for their sponsors and the ticket office reserves a block of tickets for the Official Party of the President’s Office.

Taking those university obligations into account, the FSU Ticket Office then followed guidelines established by the FSU Ticket Priority Policy, which are approved by the FSU Athletic Board, for how to distribute tickets to donors. While the formula doesn’t change, the number of tickets each donor will receive varies year to year based on the number FSU receives and the demand for them.

The number of tickets at each donor level for the 2022 Cheez-It bowl was as follows:

Warrior $650 and Tomahawk ($1300) donors — 2 each

Silver Chief ($3250) — 4 each

Golden Chief ($6500) — 6 each

Platinum Chief ($13,000) — 8 each

Legacy Chief ($25,000) — 10 each

Top 150 Donors — 12 each

Florida State hasn’t been to an in-state bowl since 2016 and it’s been even longer since FSU has seen demand for tickets exceed supply. While a quality problem, FSU and its fan base must learn the new ticketing landscape as it looks like demand for this football program will continue to climb.