FiT Publishing

A balanced panel (99 teams over 40 years) is used to estimate three regression models: average attendance via fixed and random effects plus Tobit estimation of percent of capacity. Variables are either stationary or cointegrated. Estimation makes adjustments for serial correlation and endogeneity between several variables. Independent variables measure economic conditions, demographic characteristics, and team performance. Attendance is a normal good. Travel cost is insignificant in two models but positive in one. Weak evidence suggests undergraduate enrollment and county population exert...Read more

In Division I college football, sustainability concerns exist from the growing financial divide between the Power Five and Group of Five conferences. Athletic departments can become more financially viable through generation of additional attendance revenue in the higher priced area of premium seating, but little research has been conducted on the topic. As the first premium seating study across all of Division I, results indicated the Power Five and Group of Five did not significantly differ on their available premium seating options with luxury suites, club seats, and loge boxes. Also,...Read more

Television coverage’s impact on college football attendance is a topic of debate. Between 2005 and 2019, annual growth in athletic department revenues for Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools from media rights, postseason football, and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) conference distributions far exceeded revenue growth in ticket sales revenue. This study re-evaluates the substitution or complementarity of television coverage and stadium attendance in college football with updated data while controlling for selection bias through endogenous treatment regression. Although...Read more

Reported attendance for most sport events is based on tickets disseminated, not actual number of spectators who physically enter the venue. Yet nearly all live sport event demand studies are based on reported attendance rather than the actual attendance. The current study examines multiple measures of home game attendance for NCAA Division I college football programs as reported from both game box scores and post-event scanned ticket audits provided to The Wall Street Journal. Regression models are utilized to examine factors that have a statistically significant relationship with...Read more

Panel data of 2,243 regular season games for Football Bowl Subdivision teams during 2007-09 are used to examine the relationship between the extent of video coverage and stadium utilization. Results suggest that an advertising effect overwhelms a substitution effect generated by video coverage. After controlling for other variables, national video coverage has a significant and large positive impact on attendance as a percent-age of stadium capacity, but the magnitude of this effect decreases as temperatures rise. Local coverage has a small positive impact only when a temperature-coverage...Read more

As financial and sustainability pressures placed upon collegiate athletic programs grow, it is important to understand all revenue generation areas, which include luxury suites. However, while suite finances are readily available on American professional sports, the opposite appears true for collegiate sports. As the first empirical investigation on the pricing of college suites, this study aimed to contribute to the limited literature on luxury suites and help better understand the luxury suite market. Multiple regression analyses were used to develop two significant models that estimated...Read more

The chime of a new email went initially unnoticed as Sarah Fletcher finished reading yet another reporter’s critique of the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). It had been six weeks since UAB president Ray Watts announced the decision to discontinue the university’s Division I football program. While the proverbial dust had settled, some stakeholder groups1 remained discontent following the controversial decision to become the first Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) program to disband in nearly 20 years. As the director of marketing for the UAB athletic department, Fletcher felt...Read more

In a seminal investigation of secondary pricing for college football bowl games, Rishe, Reese, and Boyle (2015) found Rose Bowl administrators price their face values in the inelastic range of consumer demand, and factors such as pent-up demand, distance traveled, and perceived seat quality impacted the size of secondary markups. Their study, however, lacked a breadth of application because it only focused on two bowl games occurring at the same venue and city. Conversely, this paper uses 9,413 transactions through TicketCity reflecting secondary ticket sales across 55 different bowl games...Read more

Sport has been found to be a good empirical setting to examine organizational (Day, Gordon, & Fink, 2012) and labor market (Kahn, 2000) phenomena. One of the most common topics using sport as an empirical setting examines succession of head coaches. Specifically, such research examines the determinants (e.g., d’Addona & Kind, 2014; Frick, Barros, Prinz, 2010; Holmes, 2011) and consequences of head coach succession (e.g., Allen, & Chadwick, 2012; Soebbing & Washington, 2011). These topics formed an active area of sports research over the past five decades since Grusky’s (...Read more

There is considerable literature regarding the primary sports pricing market (Fort, 2004; Coates & Humphreys, 2007; Krautmann & Berri, 2007) that argues that ticketing professionals engage in inelastic ticket pricing, and that such behavior is not counter to a profit-maximizing objective because it enables organizations to optimize other non-ticket sources of revenue. Additionally, there is long-standing evidence from the marketing literature (Scitovsky, 1945; Monroe & Krishnan, 1985; Tsao, Pitt, & Caruana, 2005) of a strong correlation between the price of a product and...Read more