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Boxed Out: Final Four Seats Hard to Come By
By Steve Wieberg, USA TODAY Published April 1, 2005
Clevester Hawkins' faith in God remains strong. His faith in the NCAA, however, is wavering. More than 46,000 will pack the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis for Saturday's NCAA men's basketball tournament semifinals - the Final Four - and the 60-year-old Baptist minister from Vienna, Va., won't be among them. He hasn't since 1991, coming up empty in the NCAA's ticket lottery for the 12th time in as many years. Or maybe it's the 13th. He's beginning to lose count.
"We're getting frustrated. My wife and I were talking about it yesterday. Should we try it again?" Hawkins says. "The average fan can't get tickets. It's almost futile, it appears to me."
Some do, of course. More than a fifth of the tickets to St. Louis were dispersed through a public lottery. Blocks of 4,500 went to each of the participating schools: Illinois, Louisville, North Carolina and Michigan State. The NCAA is adamant, it says, about preserving grass-roots access and ambience.
But as the Final Four has swelled into a mega-event on the order of pro football's Super Bowl, observers and even some officials say it's beginning to resemble the heavily corporate-hued Super Bowl in the stands. Tickets are among the hardest to get in American sports and some are going for more than $5,000 this week on the secondary market. If the grass-roots fan isn't getting crowded out, suggestions are that he's at least getting pushed from the prime seats.
By one estimate, the corporate presence at the semifinals and Monday night title game approaches half of those in attendance.
"The Super Bowl this year was probably about 60-40 corporate-to-fan," says Robert Tuchman of TSE Sports and Entertainment, which plans corporate outings to such events. "I would say (the Final Four) is probably more along the lines of 50-50. Maybe 45-55." That, he says, is up from a 35%-40% corporate presence five years ago.
The 50% estimate "feels high" to Greg Shaheen, an NCAA vice president who helps run the tournament. "But no question, there's corporate activity going on in and around the event," he says.
Tougher than the Super Bowl?
Direct corporate access to Final Four seats is modest: Some 2,250 tickets are allotted to TV partner CBS and, through the network, such NCAA corporate partners as Coca-Cola, Pontiac and Cingular. There are other entrees, though. Each Final Four school funnels some of its 4,500 tickets to students, but a majority go to season ticketholders.
Priority typically goes to high-end athletic donors. "And by nature," says Marc Kidd, a longtime sports marketing executive who once oversaw the NCAA's corporate partnership program for Host Communications, "those are mostly corporate people."
The basketball coaches association, which gets 3,500 tickets, takes care of a small number of corporate patrons. The local organizing committee gets 10% of the seats (close to 4,700 in St. Louis), a majority of them in suites and sold to corporate clientele to help cover expenses.
More hazy is the percentage of tickets that land on the secondary market, sold by lottery winners, coaches and other insiders to brokers, who resell them at four-figure markups. Face value tops out at $170. It's not usually Joe Fan who's willing or able to shell out up to $5,000 or more to get one.
"Consumers are now starting to evaluate whether they really want to go or whether they're entrepreneurs and want to make some money," says David Lord of RazorGator, which claims it has the largest secondary-market inventory of NCAA Tournament tickets. "We see ourselves using more of those tickets to give to corporate customers. It's really a big trend."
The upshot? Lord ranks Final Four tickets as the fourth hardest to acquire in sports, behind those to the Super Bowl, baseball's World Series and The Masters golf tournament. This year's, he notes, got tougher with a spectacular series of regional finals as a lead-in.
Plus, Illinois is a mere three-hour drive from St. Louis. Louisville is a little more than four.
"These tickets," Lord says, "could be harder to get than Super Bowl tickets this year."
Lottery odds: About 1 in 8
That annual demand is why the NCAA has moved its showcase event exclusively to large-capacity domes. Even so, as Hawkins' experience illustrates, the odds of hitting its public lottery have stayed steep - a little worse than 1 in 8 over the last five years for a fan who submits a single entry.
Odds of scoring Super Bowl tickets are far worse, 70 to 1. The NFL conducts a random drawing for 500 pairs of seats and generally gets 35,000 applications even though the opportunity isn't publicized. Chances of securing tickets to the women's Final Four are much friendlier: 70% of those who apply for tickets get them.
Hawkins, assistant pastor of the First Baptist Church in Vienna, actually got men's tickets the first time he tried 14 years ago. "At the time, we had no idea how fortunate we were," he says. "We thought you just put (your lottery entries) in and you'd get your tickets and everything was wonderful."
His latest in a subsequent string of rejections came last August.
It's a fine line the NCAA is walking. The Final Four, after all, is an enterprise tied to higher education. The players on the floor are college students, and pep bands, painted faces and everyday fans in the stands are essential to the college athletic environment.
"Clearly some vigilance is required to be sure it doesn't turn into a Super Bowl-type atmosphere," says former Big East Conference commissioner Dave Gavitt, who once headed the NCAA's Division I men's basketball committee.
But corporate tie-ins and client catering are facts of business life, and, make no mistake, big-time college sports are also business. When Coca-Cola made an 11-year sponsorship deal in June 2002, the contract was valued at more than $500 million.
The NCAA hasn't cashed in as wholly as it could. "There've been times I've sat at the Final Four and said, 'Gosh, there's a great opportunity here,' " says Jim Steeg, who coordinated the Super Bowl for 26 years before taking over recently as executive vice president and chief operating officer of the NFL's San Diego Chargers. "Sometimes, they stick their head in the sand. (But) they play the academic role, and they've got a responsibility to at least look that way."
The popularity and still clean-cut aura of the Final Four make it an increasingly attractive corporate destination and venue for entertaining. Tuchman says New York-based TSE has seen its Final Four planning business go up 20% in 2003, another 24% in 2004 and 26% this year.
That's less than TSE's growth for the Super Bowl but more than for other major sporting events including The Masters and Major League Baseball's All-Star Game.
TSE's standard five-day, four-night Final Four package includes lodging, breakfast each morning, transportation to games and a Sunday cocktail party with a celebrity host (usually a well-known coach or broadcaster). Plus, of course, tickets to the games.
Kaye Burkhardt of corporate hospitality planner Dallas Fan Fares says her Final Four business is up 30% in two years.
She predicted she'd be able to get 750 tickets this year, "and if we really pushed it, we probably could do more." She estimated four or five other firms like hers could do the same. They're not simply lucky at the lottery. "We get tickets," Burkhardt says, "from people who maybe aren't supposed to be selling their tickets."
NCAA watches for scalping
The NCAA has tried for years to get a handle on the secondary market, which RazorGator's Lord estimates will move 6%-7% of all of this year's Final Four tickets. That's pushing 3,300.
Demand, Lord says, had driven prices at the start of this week to a minimum of $310 and a high of $5,228 - depending on the game and seat location.
Among those long suspected of sharing in the profits are coaches. Division I head coaches and longtime assistants are allotted two tickets apiece; all others get one and can apply for a second if extras are available. The NCAA forbids their marked-up resale, and those caught in the act or later found to have scalped can have their ticket privileges revoked. In some cases, for life.
Without disclosing names or whether they're coaches or other insiders, the NCAA's Shaheen says "hundreds of people" have lost ticket privileges in the last five years. The NCAA is stepping up its efforts, using plainclothes officers as scalping police and taking photographs inside the arena to make sure original ticketholders are actually those occupying the seats.
Meanwhile, the NCAA is studying its distribution of Final Four tickets and weighing adjustments.
Perhaps the most likely target is the allocation for each of the four schools, which advanced to the Final Four last Saturday or Sunday and had until Thursday to claim all of their tickets. Some finalists discover they don't need all 4,500, often because of distance from the venue or lack of time to sell them. Their leftover tickets are made available to the other participating schools, and any still unclaimed are made available to CBS and the NCAA's other "major constituents."
"It's just a matter of tweaking," says NCAA executive vice president Tom Jernstedt, who oversees the men's tournament. "We may have given our participating institutions too many; do we need to adjust downward? Do we need to adjust upward for CBS and our other partners?"
Face value between $110-$170
The association is looking, too, at ticket prices. Set at $20 apiece in 1974, they range from $110 (for distant-view seats) to $170 for all three games in St. Louis.
That still pales next to the $500 and $600 face value of tickets to February's Super Bowl in Jacksonville, as Jernstedt and others at the NCAA are routinely reminded.
"We're educationally based and we want to be reasonable" about price, he says. "But we're also mindful of others saying we need to be a little more open and aggressive. ... I think there's room for growth while still being reasonable and not gouging people."
The NCAA even is casting its eye at the lucrative travel-package market.
Iowa athletics director Bob Bowlsby, who chairs the 10-man committee that oversees the tournament, suggests, "If a corporate entity is willing to pay $5,000 a ticket, maybe we ought to be putting together a package that includes their tickets and some hospitality and those kinds of things. And having the NCAA capture the $5,000 a ticket instead of having somebody buy and remarket it."
Bowlsby says he isn't sure how many tickets could be folded into such a plan. And he acknowledges, "You always have to take pause and think about doing things that are going to make an event inaccessible to the average fan. We certainly don't want to do that."
Some average fans would argue it's too late.
NCAA officials and guests will occupy one midsection of seats in St. Louis. Coaches are supposed to occupy the other. The participating schools' sets are at the four corners of the court, stretching upward.
None of the seats purchased through the public lottery are so close to the action. All are upper-level. For fans such as Hawkins, that would do.
Any seats. Anywhere. "I haven't prayed specifically for that," he says. "Maybe that might help."
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