A year ago, prior to a home basketball game against Duke, Georgia Tech put up its remaining unsold tickets for sale for $60 a piece. About 900 were purchased within 24 hours.
Not long after that, large blocks of those tickets reappeared on the ticket-resale website StubHub with a healthy markup. It was hardly a new phenomenon, but one that led the athletic department to seek a solution to enable it to hold on to more of the premium that fans are willing to pay for higher-demand games while not alienating the masses by chasing every last penny.
For the Yellow Jackets’ game against Louisville on Monday night and next Tuesday’s game against North Carolina, Tech has experimented with a centuries-old auction format that is financially savvy and may hold appeal to fans.
“I think the concept has got some value,” Tech athletic director Mike Bobinski said.
Beginning in mid-January, Tech has sold its remaining tickets for the two high-profile games using a declining-price auction, also known as a Dutch auction. Tech is calling its program Ramblin’ Rates. In it, the school sets an initial purchase price for tickets and then can drop the price based on demand. The price will never increase and won’t go lower than the prices paid by season-ticket holders.
After the auction ends, fans who purchased seats at a higher price will receive a refund for the difference between their purchase price and the final, lowest sale price. Having bought earlier in the auction, they’ll also have the benefit of having purchased better seats.
For the Louisville game, tickets for the corners and the east end zone in the lower bowl of McCamish Pavilion were initially sold at $95. That price was ultimately dropped to $75. Upper-bowl pricing began at $85 and reached $60. About 1,700 seats in McCamish (capacity: 8,600) were remaining when the auction began. Thanks in no small part to fans of No. 12 Louisville, making its first appearance in Atlanta since 1997, roughly half of the tickets have been sold.
Tech was advised by two Northwestern professors, who created an algorithm which that school used for its Dutch auctions for football and basketball games. They have since formed a consultancy and Tech was their first client.
Doug Allvine, Tech’s assistant athletic director for special projects, has led the pilot program, having come upon Northwestern’s solution and suggested it to Bobinski. Allvine, a former Tech football walk-on, has had another unpaid personal consultant in the project — his father Fred Allvine, a longtime Tech professor in the management school.
“It’s nice in that (setting ticket prices) is no longer just gut instincts and looking at your historical data,” Doug Allvine said. “There’s some math behind it.”
While the team’s lackluster record in ACC play has flattened demand, the pilot has been well received within the department.
“I think it’s been pretty good,” Bobinski said. “The way the season’s played has created sort of maybe not the truest environment to judge results. That’s just a fact of life so we have to sort of factor that into it. But I don’t think we’ve had a bad experience.”
The downside for fans is that the least expensive seat in the house Monday night not purchased as a season ticket or as part of a pack will be $60, and that’s with Tech going into the game with a 3-12 record in the ACC following its blowout loss to North Carolina Saturday. Without the auction, the least expensive tickets might have been around $45 in the upper bowl, $60 behind the basket and $80 in the corners of the lower bowl.
For Tech, the reality is that football and basketball ticket revenue is helping support its entire varsity program. In a good year, the department breaks even.
Bobinski is open to trying Ramblin’ Rates with football. With marquee opponents such as Florida State and Georgia coming to Bobby Dodd Stadium this fall, the opportunity is there.
“If it logistically and sort of mechanically works out and people kind of get it and understand it and are able to work through it, I think we’d think about doing some of that for a couple games next year, too,” he said.
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