NRF pricing going to be a huge problem

NU'06er said:

The "Who cares?" attitude toward fans is just so offputtingly contemptuous of our own fledgling fan base, I just gotta say.

I agree with you more than I disagree with you about the stadium, as we've discussed this now over multiple threads. Tend to think "dynamic pricing" just comes with the territory when you have a fancy new stadium and college football in the NIL era is now all about keeping up with the Joneses in generating revenue. Agree that there's a lot of people not being realistic in expecting things to stay exactly as they were with Old Ryan Field, or wanting a price that doesn't track with the rest of the B1G. Even agree that you make a good point about higher-priced cheap seats keeping out as many visiting fans as NU backers.

But people are allowed to roll their eyes about it while they're handing over their wallet, especially when even this supposed solution...



...is being monetized too. Don't want to subscribe to new streaming networks, go read a box score while wearing purple, amirite? (Oof.)



Shrug. If higher prices are just the way of the world, people complaining about them are too. There's just as much "What else do you expect?" in the second half of that sentence as the first.

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Well, go on to any social media platform and read the comments that basically say “Nice stadium, why can’t they fill it up”. Then the mocking begins with other criticisms related to the team, history, nerds, fan engagement etc. all to be expected as you seem to imply, but then I come on thus site to basically see our OWN fans literally complaining about just about everything stadium related. That’s off putting to me. They are entitled to complain as much as they want and I also am entitled to complain about their CONSTANT complaints.

I absolutely have a “who cares” attitude to people enjoying the game from the concourse or NU not selling out the stadium. Doesn’t bother me at all. I have been around long enough to know that dropping prices even in half wouldn’t result in an entirely filled stadium of Purple. If people don’t want to pay the offered price, they have a choice not to. This free board has morphed into Inside NU on steroids. We are having a surprise renaissance this season and there is more stadium talk than team talk. Maybe as you say, what do you expect?, but it is off putting to me.

Purple Pile Driver said:

We are having a surprise renaissance this season...

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Cheers to that. We've looked great. Makes me excited for some of the tougher tests on our schedule instead of dreadful, which is a delightful way to go through the season...

Anyone know why we can't buy single game tickets for all the games yet? Seems like they are releasing Rutgers tickets Wednesday, but I want to buy some tickets for the Illinois game.

I get holding off to push season tickets, but at this point, why not open them up? Especially if you are having sell out issues.

RiseNorthwestern said:

Anyone know why we can't buy single game tickets for all the games yet? Seems like they are releasing Rutgers tickets Wednesday, but I want to buy some tickets for the Illinois game.

I get holding off to push season tickets, but at this point, why not open them up? Especially if you are having sell out issues.

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Seems illogical right?

I don't know what the right answer is in terms of pricing. It would be best to get the place filled with purple. I got to the stadium for the first time this past weekend, and it was pretty great. I had a few minor complaints, but those are things I imagine they are fixing as they present themselves.

I have been a STH for almost 20 years, and I complained about prices. I didn't expect them to stay as low as they were, but they seem to be significantly higher than similar tickets at other Big Ten venues. I will get a little annoyed when I can't go to the game, and I can't even get anything close to what I am paying for tickets on the secondary market. If it happens too often, I believe it will make STHs drop that status and just buy on a game to game basis.

I hope they can find the balance to not price out STHs and still fill the place with purple.

Purple Pile Driver said:

This free board has morphed into Inside NU on steroids.

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A) good.
B) there is plenty of game discourse on INU, just as there are plenty of non stadium threads/topics here
C) Why is the free board even worth wasting your breath?

You don't care about whether the stadium is half full, or full of visiting fans, fine. Entitled to your opinion. I'm surprised and disappointed that you don't care about the financial effect on the modest fan base we still have. But...many companies have embraced the new business model of fewer, high margin clients. Apparently, NU/Ryans would rather have 10k high priced fans than 30k (plus a few visitors) at a price they can afford. If that's the case, they could have saved a few hundred million and made it 20k luxury seats

Everyone just has to take a step back and reflect for a moment: We just had 35k for the opener and 25k+ for a 1-5 Ball State team.

Reminder: past 2 seasons every game has been at 12k on campus and in 2023 the highest game attended was the old RF finale against Purdue with 23,291.

In other words, the fanbase is a fair bit healthier than it was in 2023 (I'm aware that's not a high bar given the pre-season debacle that year). The Iowa game will be a sellout; hopefully there's less than 10k Iowa fans in here, but who knows; plus Iowa is good this year so their fans will be even more incentivized to bid up tickets and show up to a possibly ranked matchup of both teams.

The Rutgers game is a more interesting test to me because they won't be bringing many fans, so that's probably a better measure of what the Northwestern fanbase looks like against a Big Ten opponent (even a non-traditional one).

Either way, this season is about the admin learning how to properly price tickets and all of the learning that goes into that. The next season will also be more of a learning experience as well as they see what the real season ticket numbers look like (and winning 8 or 9 games this year would help with that). It will take some time, but if we win and they get the pricing set appropriately, we can have a mostly full purple crowd throughout the year. That's the goal, but it will take a few years and some success to get there.

I have 0 worries about ticket sales this year to this point or the rest of the season.

phatcat_rivals223240 said:

A) good.
B) there is plenty of game discourse on INU, just as there are plenty of non stadium threads/topics here
C) Why is the free board even worth wasting your breath?

You don't care about whether the stadium is half full, or full of visiting fans, fine. Entitled to your opinion. I'm surprised and disappointed that you don't care about the financial effect on the modest fan base we still have. But...many companies have embraced the new business model of fewer, high margin clients. Apparently, NU/Ryans would rather have 10k high priced fans than 30k (plus a few visitors) at a price they can afford. If that's the case, they could have saved a few hundred million and made it 20k luxury seats

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The problem is your case does not hold water. The Ryan’s are pretty astute business people. The end goal is to full NRF with purple at the set pricing. It’s not to fill the stadium with low margin Butts regardless of affiliation. Do These opposing fans make the experience better for NU STH’s? How did ST sales do this year? Try to get a seat in the Loft club. Entirely sold out to NU STH’s. 100 level and Mezzanine level between the goal lines entirely STH’s or damn close. I can tell you the first two games were Utopia not sitting anywhere near visiting fans. NU was never going to sell out the stadium to NU fans even if they charged $10 for the seats that are currently unsold! It makes no sense to lower the prices to a point that it pisses off the actual STH’s either for the disparity pricing or the fact they could be over run with these opponents fans.

Maybe they will make adjustments next season in these less desirable seats. Don’t know, but I suspect they won’t be lowered to the point it encourages ticket brokers to buy them up or shade tree NU fans that buy for 1-2 games they want to attend and then try and profit in the after market.

As far as Inside NU, you may be right. Maybe it is filled with interesting football thoughts, I gave up on it a few years ago, because a bunch of posters were either so negative or completely uninformed that it wasn’t worth my time to read the drivel. As far as this site, there are still a lot of good posters, if I see a topic that interests me or a poster that I know, I generally read and/or participate. If not, I skip it.

One other reminder: (which supports @Purple Pile Driver's point):

In this new stadium especially: something like 10% of the seats will generate around 40+% of the revenue (and those will be sold out at pretty much every game for the foreseeable future). So that's 3000-4000 of our purple fans that will generally be paying near a half the revenue the stadium needs to generate at every game. That's just a reality of why they built this kind of palace.

In a modern NIL world where we have to pay players and try to compete in a Big Ten full of high spenders; we need a stadium with NFL-level premium seating. That's why the Ryans chose this direction for the stadium. The AD needs the revenue to compete because we're likely going to need to escalate our NIL towards the middle or upper half of the conference. It's a lot harder with a smaller fanbase, but this is the one way that it's doable when you have several thousand wealthy alums that want to win.

They can work at the margins to figure out how to get the extra seats filled as they learn what demand is for the last few thousand seats that are unsold at a game like Ball State.

The Ball State game probably generated a revenue number not that far off from the Penn State game for example because the premium seats were filled despite the 25k vs 35k overall disparity.

zeek55 said:

The Ball State game probably generated a revenue number not that far off from the Penn State game for example because the premium seats were filled despite the 25k vs 35k overall disparity.

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I think the point is that it's not good for the sport as a whole that we've hit a point where the presence or absence of 10,000 fans is negligible, even if I don't blame Northwestern in the slightest for building a stadium that is revenue-optimal.

Purple Pile Driver is correct that complaining about it may as well be the Simpsons' Old Man Yells at Cloud meme.

But there are plenty of NU fans that fit the profile of Grandpa Abe for whom that is cold comfort.

Again, ultimately, shrug.

Purple Pile Driver said:

As far as Inside NU, you may be right. Maybe it is filled with interesting football thoughts, I gave up on it a few years ago, because a bunch of posters were either so negative or completely uninformed that it wasn’t worth my time to read the drivel.

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For my money, the problem with iNU is the moderation, which doesn't seem to know its own site rules.

They nominally prohibit trolling, then have 100+ comment threads where ignoring two people wipes out all but a couple comments from visibility. But they can't figure out that those problem commenters insistence on inserting themselves into every conversation with their respective agendas is indeed trolling behavior that is driving people away, whether intentional or not.

Just like here, there are some quality posters and discussions to be had. But there's a frustrating amount of noise to signal (which go figure, seems to be the main complaint about the free board here, so I guess apropos of this entire stadium thread -- you get what you pay for)...