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Clearly, you haven't ridden the light rail previously. Jump on it sometime around 7:30 am at the Lincoln Station and ride it downtown.
Would be perfect for a college baseball stadium. Just sayin.
The problem with staying at 55k or whatever becomes the revenue gap between CU and most B1G and SEC programs simply due to the stadium size differences. Conservatively, with around 20k fewer seats than the average big time programs, that would be $2m per game less if the average ticket costs $100/game, or $12-$14m/season just in ticket revenue. Add merch, food and bev sales to that and you're probably looking at another $10-$15m/season for a total of around $25-$30m/year gap.
West stands need renovation. Balch is probably becoming a safety hazard. Must address it. A west stands redesign might add 10-15k bringing capacity to 60-65k. That feels right.
At $50 per ticket average, every 1k in capacity is $300-350k in additional base revenue per season.
More suites? Absolutely. Chairbacks on the west side between the 20s? Absolutely. These will have a negligible impact on actual capacity but will result in more revenue.
Not disagreeing with you guys here, rather adding an additional layer of color:
Cheap seats create energy. We don't want to turn our home games into a Stanford type crowd. I think you need an expanded student section, creation of a family seating area, and a full 2nd deck around the entire stadium for value priced seats working class folks (most of us) can afford.
I think both of you are right.
Prepare for success. I'd say if they're making plans based on "let's make sure to renovate with an eye to it making sense if we suck & can't sell more than 40k tickets" then that's the mentality which directly leads to sucking and struggling to sell more than 40k tickets.
Oh, I agree with you. My point is that I haven't agreed with them until the last year. We've been planning on filling ~40k seats or less since the inception of this program.
A million people use RTD light rail every month, it’s not just Bronco games.
How long do you expect Todd Saliman to be University President? It's true that this is all a Prime creation right now, but do you think people are buying tickets to come see Prime coach or see great players and a good to great team play? What about 2016 and the couple sell outs that season? This state has shown it will majorly support a winning CU football program. Hiring Prime just allowed the University to skip the slow build and gradual increase in support and donations.
Don’t forget that at least 5k of whatever capacity increase we do will have to be student seats.
People are currently buying tickets because Prime has made CU the center of the sports world, and people want to see the show. Would elevated interest continue if Prime leaves and we maintain a really competitive program? yes. At the same level? I don't know, and a lot of that depends on how many new fans are created during Prime's tenure (much like CU created a bunch of new life long fans when Mac was here). But you hit at the core question I am asking, which is, how much faith do we have in CU leadership to sustain this after he leaves. I honestly cannot answer that question with any level of confidence. Maybe you guys know more about it then I do.
They at least need to preserve the view from the champions center and coaches offices - those are big recruiting tools in all the team videos and recruit photos.
I can buy that. But as I said, adding 10-15 rows to the South stands wouldn’t have a discernible impact on that view. Those offices are pretty high.
I certainly don't know more about it than you, but I guess I don't know why Todd Saliman would change his stance and commitment in a post-Prime era. Also, I'm not sure sustaining what is happening right now should be an expectation in the post-Prime world. This is a unicorn situation that would be abnormal for pretty much every program in the country. As nik said, prepare for success. IMO, continuing to go all in with football by increasing capacity (among other things) might be the exact mentality that keeps Prime here.
I saw a figure, don't know how current, that said that 38% of the people who work in downtown Denver get there using mass transit. Spend a few minutes walking around Union Station at rush hour and it is easy to believe.
I've been critical of how expensive CU tickets have been for years. They're consistently some of the most expensive in the conference, even before this year's insanity. However, Nik was making an argument about revenue and I was looking at it through that lens. Personally I'd take a sellout 100 times out of 100 even if it means slightly less money, because I'm a fan and not an accountant.
My argument was based on only making an average of $50 per ticket from stadium expansion, though.
