The Minnesota football team announced Tuesday night that its home-and-home series with Texas in 2015 and 2016 has been cancelled due to “a contract impasse concerning video rights.”
So reports the University of Minnesota paper.
And the bad news doesn’t stop there. The university just built, at amazing expense, a huge new football stadium. The president has spent most of his time since they built it trying to decide who gets to drink alcohol there — only rich people, or rich people plus students.
But no one has worried about ticket sales. After all the university justified the amazing expense by saying that football is so popular students and alumni demand a bigger stadium.
This morning, UD‘s friend Bill sends her this.
Student ticket sales slump, half unsold
The University of Minnesota has currently sold about 5,500 of the 10,000 student tickets available. That’s roughly 1,000 tickets behind last year’s sales at this time.
… For some students … excitement over the new stadium isn’t enough to overlook the team’s poor performance.
“I’ve just given up on this football team,” said University graduate student and former season ticket holder Carl Mullen-Schultz. “I’ve decided to focus on our basketball team.” …
You know what this means. The university will spend millions more on pr and advertising. They’ll increase student athletic fees by hundreds of dollars. The university’s president will dress up like a clown and invite people to throw water balloons in his face for a thousand dollars a pop.
July 28th, 2010 at 10:01AM
These football schedules so far into the future are sometimes as accurate as hedge fund prospectuses. The Minnesota students, on the other hand, are well aware that
Paul Bunyan’s Axe is on an extended stay in Madison, and I’d be happy if it stayed there until 2016!
July 28th, 2010 at 10:07AM
The first part is actually the more interesting. If the big-time BCS conferences are built around TV revenue from football, they need to control the rights to as many of their games as they can. That will make interconference games hard to schedule. More and more “outside” games will be against teams from weaker leagues (middling or worse teams from weaker leagues, most likely, to avoid upsets); and you have to question whether Notre Dame’s go-it-alone strategy can survive.
July 28th, 2010 at 2:34PM
More evidence that Nebraska was correct in charging that Texas is planning to set up its own TV network and cut the rest of the Big 12 out of the action.
July 29th, 2010 at 8:37AM
Most of the over 50,000 students at the University of Minnesota will never attend a single football game–but each semester ALL of them will pay the fee that the senior administrators and the Regents imposed to pay for the stadium.