Until something changes, I am very skeptical we will ever sell out the tickets AND have a capacity crowd at a football game again. There's many possible factors, but #1 is the pricing and availability of tickets.
The overall game experience and tickets are severely overpriced, and the tickets are digital, so until that changes we won't have a capacity crowd ever again. The Holy Cross "sell out" (where we had ~36,000 people in attendance) was so ridiculous to me.
The concession prices are solely the university's fault- the 16oz beer cans are $16 and mixed drinks are $23. I asked for a cup with my beer and they told me an empty cup would be an additional $23 because of how they operate. Who would want to deal with all that BS unless they are a die hard Cuse football fan??
But to me, the digital ticketing price bubble is really the major issue- our fans are getting raked over the coals. Most people don't know Seatgeek prices are vastly higher than ticketmaster's prices, especially casual fans that we want to bring into the fold with us. Ticketmaster's prices are marked up 20% or more form what the seller designates. The digital ticketing system is truly a complete nightmare. They are causing the tickets sold online to be priced at ~150% of the asking price.
***If I put a football ticket on sale for $44, it will be on ticketmaster for approximately $70, and seatgeek for approximately $100. Although I receive $39 when the tickets sells, a buyer may pay over $100 for that same ticket on Seatgeek (maybe $80 on TM) and yet I collect $39 on that sale.
Also, we no longer have flippers outside the Dome buying and selling the last few hundreds/thousand tickets that were unspoken for. If i want to simply give my tickets away, I need to get someone's email address, log into a digital ticket system, "send" them the ticket, and then have them create an account and password, etc, and sign up for the stupid app, just so someone can use the ticket. It is an incredibly dumb system that will continue to suppress attendance.
My tickets don't always get used because of this bad system, and even with the shrunken dome, it will be borderline impossible for us to find 44,000 upstate New Yorkers that are okay with spending a 50% premium on digital tickets, that will download the digital ticket app, pay $30 to park and then pay $16 for a can of beer.
Older fans also absolutely hate this app/digital ticket process. It is really a mix of foolish and inconsiderate that they did this and left fans with no ability to get printed tickets or to print out PDFs of their tickets. Raiders season ticket holders or SU LAX fans, etc, don't get hassled in this manner.
