The Athletic Department may over-sell tickets for non-Southeastern Conference games starting this season in an effort to increase student attendance, according to LSU Ticket Manager Brian Broussard.
Broussard said the extra ticket policy is “pretty set,” but the Athletic Department is still trying to determine how many tickets they will over-sell and for which games.
“It’s not an exact science,” Broussard said. “We don’t know the exact numbers, but we just want to help students get into the games they want to go to.”
For non-SEC home games, the Athletic Department will use the number of students in attendance to previous games to determine how many extra tickets to sell. Games with early kick-offs or a history of poor attendance will also be considered. Broussard said Ole Miss and Mississippi State could have extra tickets sold.
“We’re looking at out-of-conference games right now,” Broussard said. “But that may expand to other games.”
Broussard said he doesn’t expect the Alabama or Georgia games to have extra tickets.
In 2007, an average of 2,238 students who purchased season tickets did not attend home games, according to the Ticket Office. The largest absence of students was during the Louisiana Tech game when 3,616 students did not show up.
The percentage of students in attendance compared to the number of student tickets sold in 2007 never topped 94 percent and bottomed out at 75 percent.
More than 1,000 extra tickets could be sold, according to Broussard.
“It could get that high,” Broussard said. “We’ve had games where 6,000 students didn’t show.”
Broussard said the Athletic Department will be wary of over-crowding.
“It’s touchy,” Broussard said. “We’ll be conservative. We don’t want to cause traffic, but we know there’s space available and we want to accommodate those students who want to attend.”
Colorado Robertson, Student Government president, said SG has been working with the Athletic Department for some time to negotiate selling extra tickets.
“When 3,600 students don’t show up to a game, that looks bad,” Robertson said. “It’s our responsibility to use those tickets.”
Additionally, the Athletic Department chose to re-allocate 300 seats reserved for student organizations in section 104 to the public.
“In lieu of a ticket price increase, we re-allocated the seats to the public to generate extra revenue,” Broussard said.
Broussard said extra revenue was needed to fund the building of the new band hall and to combat increasing general expenses.
Robertson said SG was strongly opposed to the reduction of the student section.
“We’re the students,” Robertson said. “Without us, there would be no athletics. Our initial request was ‘Don’t take away 300 seats.’ We were told ‘no’ twice.”
Despite the 300-seat reduction in section 104, Robertson said SG was also able to negotiate the addition of 350 seats to the student section.
Those 300 seats and 50 additional seats will be added to the student section out of a number of seats normally not sold for security reasons.
“There’s a number of seats we hold for security purposes,” Broussard said. “A number of years ago, we use to sell to capacity and there were fights constantly. We’re cutting into that security section a bit by putting in an additional 350 seats for students.”
Broussard said he doesn’t expect any problems to arise from the increase in seats.
“The fewest no-shows we’ve had was the Florida game, and 841 students didn’t show for that,” Broussard said. “So we’re confident that we’ll still have that buffer.”
Robertson said this policy will be particularly beneficial for freshmen.
“We want freshmen to have an opportunity to go to the games and build their priority points,” Robertson said.
Broussard said the policy will also benefit students who didn’t want to or couldn’t purchase season tickets.
“They’ll still be able to at least attend some of the games,” Broussard said.
—-Contact Katie Kennedy at [email protected]