Jaguars Lose 15,000 Season-Ticket Holders

With season-ticket sales off to a rough start, Jacksonville Jaguars management is revving up marketing efforts and repackaging tickets to add value and affordability since about 15,000 season-ticket holders ditched their stadium seats this year, more than doubling the nonrenewal rate of prior years. Bill Prescott, the team's senior vice president of stadium operations and chief financial officer, said club surveys showed that 65 percent of season-ticket holders who did not renew blamed the economy. He said the team is well off the 43,000 season tickets it had sold at this time last year for the approximately 67,000 uncovered seats at Jacksonville Municipal Stadium.

Source: Jacksonville Business Journal

 

heck the economy

 

Can we end the J-ville experiment please. They clearly are incapable of supporting a NFL team. They tarp over seats to lower seat count, they have most of their games blacked out locally, & the weather sucked balls there for the Super Bowl embarassing the league. LA Jaguars has a nice ring to it. This isn't a matter of the economy. Buffalo is as economically depressed as a city can get (aside from Detroit) and still has their 4th highest season ticket total ever and sold out all last season and is close to doing it again with only 3 games with tix left.

 

A team in L.A. would also die.

 

It can't be worse than Jacksonville. It's easy to say LA will fail based on the Rams but all they need is more than 57K-65K average to do better than J-ville. Hell, the Angels average 41K and the Dodgers pull 46K. The woeful UCLA Bruins average 72K. It's absurd to think an NFL team couldn't consistently pull 70K in America's 2nd largest metropolitan area.

 

WR is right, the economy isn't to blame on this one. In all seriousness I would hate to see the Jags move but it seems to become more inevitable by the year.

I don't know whats to blame. Its a nice, medium-sized city (bigger than Nashville) with great weather year round, a decent stadium and in an area of the country that loves football. Maybe having three teams with roots in the state was a problem from the get go and the fact they started from scratch, though they had success early. College football rules in the South and I guess the northern part of Florida is CFB through and through.

LA might do well if they have an established team and win early.

 

The city is really spread out too. Geographically, it's huge. I remember them snitching about that during the Superbowl there. Also, they don't really have any superstar names. I'm not talking about great players, I'm talking about guys you put on the cover of your media guide to sell tickets.

 

.... . . . . LMAO!!! Don't bring that wack butt team to my city!! (Los Angeles) It's nothing but Raider fans out here!!

 

J'ville is the largest city in terms of area in the US. It's so spread out that it can take an upwards of 3 hours to get from side to side.

The way the city is designed makes things difficult (it's basically four "islands" with bridges linking between each one). It's also a pretty lower class city as well, so there's some of your problems right there.

That said, if you're going to move them, I suggest staying in that region, giving the entire Gulf Coast a team would be a good idea. May not be the money there to make that happen, but it's good in theory.

 

Move them to Texas or New York...one of those states would support a 3rd team better than LA or Jacksonville will ever support 1 for the NFL..

 

New York only has 1 team, and they play in Buffalo (sometimes Toronto). Jersey might take a 3rd though.

 

Agree 100%...

 

Bear with me, I have no idea about the kind of people that lives in certain states...

But why is the northwestern part of the country so lonely? LOL



Montana, Idaho, Wyoming... is that all farmer land or something?

 

Probably just not big enough of a market cool map

 

Even when this team was winning, they weren't doing that hot with their ticket sales. Very much like the Atlanta Braves. The Braves had trouble selling out Championship and World Series Games.

 

Wyoming has a population of 500,000, it's the least populated state in the nation and I don't think it's a football driven area either. The only way I could see that working out is if they put a team representative of the whole region (Montana, Wyoming, Dakotas). It'd be interesting to see Nebraska, Virginia, Alabama, or even Kentucky get one

 

Alabama would probably be a good location.

 

I don't know about those listed...they are great football cities, but do you think it would be like putting an NBA Franchise in North Carolina?

 

Alabama can't afford to house one.

The only three reasonable cities would be Mobile, Birmingham and Auburn.

Auburn is way too college-oriented of a town to work, Mobile wouldn't bring any fans, and Birmingham is too broke to even support one.

Not to mention the mayor is a loony...

 

Didn't know that, I was going off population numbers.

A team in the deep south won't work for the reasons posted above: too poor, too small or too in love with college football. Kentucky is too consumed with UK basketball for an NFL team to turn a profit.

What about a Sacramento or Portland?