July 17, 2003
TO: Fans, Friends, and Supporters of LSU Athletics
FROM: Skip Bertman, LSU Director of Athletics
This Week:
- Priority Seating and the “12-Percent Law”
- Club Seating and the West Side Expansion
- Funding Gap is Widening
Many of you have written about the amounts of money some schools have poured into their athletics facilities and asked how it is possible they could have so much more money than LSU.
The biggest discrepancy between LSU and its competitors is in “priority seating,” the practice of attaching an annual contribution to the price of each season ticket, with higher contributions required for better seats. Priority seating is the most common method of generating revenue through football seating at most Division I-A athletic programs.
By now you are familiar with the state law that restricts Louisiana universities to using only 12 percent of the seats in its stadium for fund-raising. That law is not going to change this year, so we must pursue alternative methods of raising new revenue.
With that limited number of seats, LSU was able to generate, through the Tiger Athletic Foundation, only $3.1 million in 2002 from its priority seating program. Here’s what SEC schools made from their priority seating programs in 2002:
PRIORITY FOOTBALL SEATING AT SEC SCHOOLS (2002)
Florida, $15 million
Tennessee, $13.4 million
Alabama, $12 million
South Carolina, $11.3 million
Georgia, $9.5 million
Auburn, $7 million
Arkansas, $5.2 million
Ole Miss, $5 million
Mississippi State, $3.1 million
LSU, $3.1 million
Kentucky, $2 million
Considering some schools have been doing this for many years, it’s easy to see why they have been able to spend more on facilities and on operating their athletics programs. This is a serious problem for LSU because by generating $8 to $12 million less than its top competitors annually, LSU falls further and further behind as the years go by.
Another key fund-raising tool is Club Seating. With only about 800 club seats in Tiger Stadium, LSU also ranks low in club seating revenue. The renovation of the west side of Tiger Stadium would help us generate more money through Club Seating.
FOOTBALL CLUB SEATING AT SEC SCHOOLS (2002)
Georgia, $9.2 million
Auburn, $7 million
Arkansas, $4.2 million
Ole Miss, $2.7 million
Florida, $2 million
Mississippi State, $1.7 million
South Carolina, $1.6 million
LSU, $1 million
Alabama, $930,000
Tennessee, $0
Kentucky, $0
A school can rank low in one of these two categories as long as it ranks high in the other. But to rank low in both categories can be financially devastating to an institution. Here is how the SEC schools stack up with combined priority seating and club seating revenue:
COMBINED PRIORITY SEATING+CLUB SEATING AT SEC SCHOOLS
Georgia, $18.7 million
Florida, $17 million
Auburn, $14 million
Tennessee, $13.4 million
South Carolina, $12.9 million
Alabama, $12.9 million
Arkansas, $9.4 million
Ole Miss, $7.7 million
Mississippi State, $4.8 million
LSU, $4.1 million
Kentucky, $2 million
Don’t forget that the schools ahead of us are still on the move. Florida opens a new club seating area this fall that will add over $8 million annually to its revenues; Georgia and Auburn have approval for stadium expansion, and Alabama is preparing to add over 10,000 seats. Expansions will obviously result in even more revenue for those schools.
These funding gaps certainly hurt our ability to build facilities, but it also creates problems funding the day-to-day operations of the athletics program. The cost of running a top caliber SEC program, like all costs associated with college athletics, will continue to grow. So with two major financial gaps to fill (building facilities and the simple cost of doing business) it becomes more and more critical to find new sources of revenue.
We encourage your feedback by e-mailing LSUvision@etigers.net. Thank you for your continued support of Tiger Athletics.
(Financial figures above were provided by each of the universities in the Southeastern Conference. Figures for Vanderbilt, a private institution, were not provided.)