A limited number of Alabama football, full season ticket packages were offered to the general public this week. Such an opportunity has not been available for more than a decade.
There is good news for some Alabama football fans. The University made a limited number of full season, ticket packages available to the general public. The cost of each seat is $395, plus $160 Tide Pride fee. All available seats are the South Upper Deck.
This link will take you to rolltide.com to select a seat and purchase tickets.
While this is good news for Alabama football fans who have not had a previous chance to buy season tickets, it bodes reasons for concern. New season ticket buyers will not have an automatic renewal opportunity. A call to the Tide Pride office can explain that decision and what it means for season ticket purchases in subsequent seasons.
Of greater concern is the reality of declining, national, college football attendance trends having reached Tuscaloosa. There are many reasons. Parking, traffic, lack of reasonably priced hotels (or rooms at any price) discourage regular attendance by out-of-town fans.
Many out-of-town Tide Pride members attend only two or three games per year. Selling the extra tickets was once easy. In today’s environment, many of the extra tickets are transferred to others through Tide Pride or given away to family and friends.
Games are great fun inside the stadium. Concessions and restrooms do not match that great experience. And it is too pricey, even with just a day trip, for many people.
Why might the new availability be a cause for concern? Supposedly, several thousand names have been on the Tide Pride waiting list for years. Without a significant ‘extra’ donation, the wait, on average, was believed to be several years. Some combination of two things has led to the new ticket opportunity. Non-renewals in other parts of the stadium have filled the waiting list demand or people on the waiting list passed on South Upper Deck offers.
Either way, the demand for season tickets has decreased. The schedule might be part of the reason. The slow move to home-and-home, high profile games will help.
Making the overall stadium experience better for ALL fans would help more than anything. There is a real possibility Bryant-Denny is too big. Re-doing the lower bowls and some of the east and west upper decks with chair-back seats makes sense, even if it reduced capacity by 10K or more. Seat displacement would be an issue with reduced capacity, but ticket scaling (up and down) would work out the problem.
The new plans for Bryant-Denny do not include such a change. Greg Byrne would be wise to re-think the huge renovation that may not do enough to keep most season ticket holders happy.