John Ricks didn’t mind paying as much as he does for Syracuse student football season tickets – that is, until he found out they were the most expensive set in the Big East.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Ricks, a junior environmental engineering major, laughed. ‘They should be giving those things away for free.’

At $115 per student, Syracuse is the priciest among Big East teams that offer season-ticket packages for its students, despite reducing its prices for the 2009 season. SU rests $33 dollars above Louisville, the second highest on the list. Rutgers, Connecticut and Pittsburgh round out the conference at $77, $42 and $25, respectively.

Some schools, like South Florida, could not be included in the list because they offer tickets as part of the student fee, thus making the amount impossible to determine. West Virginia, similarly, offers a ticket lottery system. Without giving a specific price, Cincinnati said its tickets will be below the $115 and $82 dollar marks.

With a team going through the worst stretch in program history, coupled with a slumping economy, students like Ricks may start to follow the trend of his classmates and discontinue his season tickets.

In numbers provided to The Daily Orange by Senior Associate Director of Athletics Patrick Campbell, the number of student season ticket holders is down substantially from last year.

Student ticket sales rose from 4,149 in 2006-07 to 4,161 in 2007-08. But sales plummeted before last season, as the athletic department sold 623 fewer football ticket subscriptions.

The loss represents a steeper parallel to non-student season ticket holders, which have also been on a steady decline since the 2006-07 campaign, dropping by an average of 35.6 ticket holders per year. Last year’s average overall attendance was 33,474, the lowest in Carrier Dome history.

‘We looked at what we’ve had from the student season ticket standpoint, and with all the different challenges that students have, students are in the same position as everyone else is in economically,’ said Scott Sidwell, executive senior associate athletics director.

To combat this, SU Athletics is working hard to use the momentum built by the hiring of new head coach Doug Marrone, and its new affordability plan, to buck recent sales trends. For students, prices will remain at $115, last year’s price, even though the 2009 slate includes two more home games, dropping the per-game price by 25 percent. This is part of the affordability initiative, Sidwell said.

But if that will entice students back, when they have the opportunity to purchase tickets this summer, has yet to be determined. Jameson Fleming, the president of Otto’s Army, has noticed the decline in the student section he patrols every Saturday as well. After a 2006-07 season in which he described as ‘up, but not great,’ attendance waned to the point where it was what he referred to as ‘God awful.’

‘The UConn game, I think it was, I showed up 20 minutes beforehand and got in the front row,’ Fleming said.

Of course, the Syracuse football team’s performance has something to do with it. Over the last four years the team has gone 10-37, with just three Big East wins during the tenure of former head coach Greg Robinson. Add that to zero winning seasons since 2001, and you have a recipe for an empty Carrier Dome.

‘If our team was half decent I wouldn’t mind paying for it, but I don’t think I’m buying season tickets for next season,’ Charlo Kirk, a freshman acting major, said. ‘The price should reflect the record the team had the previous year.’

However, an often overlooked factor, the economy, in conjunction with the cost of the tickets, could be a deterrent for students who want to save some money.

Dave Richardson, an economics professor at SU, said that excessive items like season tickets are often the first things to be dropped from a person’s budget once the market takes a turn for the worse.

‘A bad economy almost always leads to a bigger contraction of luxury purchases than of other kinds,’ Richardson said. ‘And if season tickets are a part of that from the students’ point of view, demand is going to decline radically.’

It’s a situation that Sidwell and the rest of SU Athletics are looking to prevent before the problem grows more severe.

On top of the hiring of a new football coach, SU Athletics introduced its new affordability package on Feb. 22, an initiative which is ‘inclusive of every Syracuse fan … for the Syracuse community to support the football team during difficult economic times,’ Director of Athletics Daryl Gross said in the press release.

Sidwell said the plan includes lowered ticket prices in the end zones and corner seats while remaining steady on the lower end zones. Prices on lower sideline seats were raised to counteract.

But Richardson encourages the athletic department to get creative. A product that has a fixed price like Syracuse season tickets may be a deterrent to some who aren’t sure what the outcome of the purchase will be.

‘Maybe a price for students that would recognize the bad economy but might promise them a refund if next season is as bad as last season was,’ Richardson suggested as a good idea. ‘When you have that kind of hook in the ticket, a student might say ‘Hmm, if the season is just as bad I’ll get a refund and it will look cheaper.’ I don’t think the athletic department has ever thought of that kind of creative pricing system.’

For the professor, it’s a win-win situation.

‘That, of course would make the pressure even greater on the coach, but that’s OK,’ he laughed. ‘Because if they have another lousy season, the university has to give the fans their money back in-part.’

ctorr@syr.edu

-Asst. sports editor Matt Ehalt contributed reporting to this article

Published on March 17, 2009 at 12:00 pm