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Tampa Bay Buccaneers Continue to Prove that Blackouts are a Bad Idea
NFL opening game? Check.
Division rival? Check.
Local TV blackout? Check.
On Sunday, the NFL blacked out the opening game of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the third consecutive season. Overall, the Bucs have had 14 of their last 16 games blacked out locally.
Sunday’s blackout happened despite the Bucs attempts to draw fans back by lowering ticket prices and despite the team’s decision to lower their blackout threshold to 85% of capacity.
It seems the Bucs are learning the hard way what happens when you withhold your product from your customers – nobody cares anymore.
Fans and sports bar owners are sounding off in the local media against the blackouts. One Tampa bar owner confessed, “The blackouts are killing us.” Hell, even the Bucs organization can’t be happy with what is transpiring down there.
One frustrated Bucs fan summed up the whole situation perfectly: “How are they supposed to build a fan base if you can’t even watch them?”
Earlier this year, Ricky in Tampa was one of over 4,000 fans who wrote into the FCC asking the agency to end its blackout rule. Ricky wrote, in part: “My tax dollars paid for this stadium. This is bizarre that I can’t watch my own team. I have boycotted the NFL for 2 years now. I threw away 15 team shirts. Stop the insanity.”
Edward in Tampa shared Ricky’s sentiments about the generous subsidies the public grants NFL owners:
Here we are subsidizing billionaires with stadium, concessions, parking, and tax considerations while at the same time they are making billions in TV and radio deals along with countless tens of millions more in licensing fees and the greed expressed in blackouts almost defies the imagination.
And as with blackouts in Buffalo, San Diego and Cincinnati, fans who are nowhere near Tampa Bay are being punished. Daniel in Merritt Island, Florida also wrote into the FCC:
I live over a 100 miles directly East of Tampa, that’s 2 hours away. Yet, because my viewing area falls under the Orlando cable service, I find myself caught within the blackout rule. This also means I can’t go into a local bar with the Sunday ticket to watch the game, they are also blacked out. Even better, I can’t travel 1 hour north or 1 hr south of my location to watch the game in a Sports Bar, I just think that’s ridiculous.
Putting aside the fact that these blackouts are unethical because taxpayers subsidized Raymond James Stadium, many of these comments filed at the FCC are direct evidence that blackouts are counterproductive and actually cost the team fans.
Indeed, the Tampa Bay Bucs are proof that blackouts alienate more loyal fans than create new fans. This should come as no surprise to the NFL, as nine top sports economists collaborated earlier this year to write that “blackouts have no significant effect on ticket sales in the NFL.”
(The only time blackouts actually work, according to the economists? Occasionally they force a few extra fans in bad weather to come out – something that’s not a problem in Tampa Bay.)
So how could a league with such a knack for marketing itself not see that its blackout policy is actually doing more harm than good?
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On Monday 9/10/2012 I talked
On Monday 9/10/2012 I talked to Mickey Farrell of TSA regarding attendance at RayJay for this past Sunday’s game (9/9/2012) against the Panthers. · 51,533 tickets were sold or comped. · 46,758 was the count thru the turnstiles. · Capacity of RayJay is 65,890. Per Mickey, this breaks out to approximately 13,000 premium seats and 53,000 non-premium seats. So, to get to the 85% threshold to avoid the blackout would require selling of 45,000 non-premium seats (85% of 53,000). So, not knowing how many of the 51,533 tickets were comped and how many were premium seating, we cannot calculate how many tickets we are short of preventing the blackout.
If one assumes that the % of tickets sold/comped for premium and non-premium were the same for this game: 51,533/65,890 = 78%, then that translates to 78% of 13,000 = 10,140 premium seats sold/comped. Thus non-premium seats sold/comped = 51,533 – 10,140 = 41,393. Thus the shortfall of meeting the 85% would be 45,000 – 41,393 - non-premium comp seats = 3,607 + non-premium comp seats.
Assuming an average ticket price for non-premium seats of $72, that translates to about $25 per seat cost to the Glazers (34%) if they were to buy the tickets needed to get to the 85% threshold. $25 x 3,607 = $90,175. So the cost to prevent the blackout would be $90,175 + ($25 x number of non-premium comped tickets).
If one assumes that 100% of the premium tickets sold, then about another 3,000 non-premium tickets would have not been sold, so the total shortfall would have been about 6,600 tickets. At $25 per ticket, that would translate to $165,000 cost for the Glazers to buy up the tickets.
So here we have a case where the Glazers (receiving about $15,000,000 per year for 30 years for the full care and feeding of RayJay) with net worth of $2.7 billion, could have prevented the blackout for the opening game for about $100,000, keeping in mind distribution of those free tickets would have generated additional parking and concession revenue. To put into perspective, sort of, how little $100,000 is to the Glazers, let’s compute what % of their net worth this is and then compare that for the same % of net worth for someone fortunate enough to be worth $1 million. 100,000/2,700,000,000 = .000037 = .0037% .0037% of $1 million = $37 Is this chump change for the Glazers or what?
So the Glazers consciously choose to be stupidly selfish, thereby depriving the community that has greatly facilitated there continual rise to more and more personal wealth, of local TV broadcasting revenues, increased restaurant/pub business, and most importantly, access to viewing the game for hundreds of thousands of ‘fans’ who, for whatever reason, do not attend games in person.
I guess the Glazers have determined that YOU CAN TAKE IT WITH YOU.