9,101 and Counting... A Look at UTSA Season Ticket Sales **Updated**

Photo courtesy of Flickr user atomictroy

Color me shocked. We find ourselves four weeks away from UTSA's first down of football and the University has already sold 9,101 season tickets. That's already 700 more than Southern Alabama's inaugural season in 2009 and 4,000 more than Georgia State's inaugural season last year. For comparison's sake, Colorado St., a Mountain West Conference program on the possible verge of evolving into an Automatically Qualifying conference, has yet to break the 7,000 mark. Furthermore, UTSA is on pace to out sell every program in the Sunbelt Conference (that one's for you, WAC Scout board).

What really has me fascinated is that coach Coker reported nearly 8,000 tickets sold just one week ago at the WAC media day. I'm not sure if 1,100+ tickets sold per week is sustainable, but if it is then we're looking at 13,501 season ticket sales in 2011. That is absolutely mind-numbing for an FCS team whom's marquee home games include two fellow young start up programs in Southern Alabama and Georgia St. To make the math a little easier, I estimated a baseline price of $120 per seat (tickets range from $1,250 to $70 in price) which puts us at $1,092,120 in the athletics department's pockets. UTSA has already sold at least 32 of 36 available luxury suits-- that brings in an additional $512,000 (estimated baseline price of $16,000 [does not include additional suite passes at $120 a pop]) to put us at $1,604,120 in revenue with four more weeks of sales to go. 80% of the luxury suites revenue and arbitrary amounts from season ticket sales go in to the Roadrunner Athletic fund (more information on all of that here). The previous high for the annual Roadrunner Athletic Fund was... $176,000 in 2009-2010. Also we have to keep in mind that UTSA has an extremely favorable "sweetheart" deal with the city for leasing the facility. While the terms for the deal were never publicly released (that I know of)  (see update below) it's safe to say that UTSA is taking home a very high percentage of its revenue as straight profit. I'm no accountant but I'm fairly certain that $1,604,120 + an approximate $14,000,000 in student athletic fees and X amount of single-game tickets sales, as well as an increase of merchandise sales will easily pay off player scholarships, coaches' salaries, and equipment expenses. If my postulation is accurate, that means a lot of money is going to be available for non-revenue sports, which is always a great thing to see.

In summation, the UTSA athletic department is cashing some huge checks right now. Can't wait to see what these numbers are going to look like when UTSA is competing in the FBS with out of conference games against Arizona St., Baylor, Houston, etc.

30 days 'till kick off.

Edit: Our friend Darrell over at utsafootball.wordpress.com just compared UTSA's ticket sales numbers to those of some other local FBS teams, very interesting.


**UPDATE**

Fyatuk from the Scout board and the Spurs talk forum pointed out that the lease was released and posted the details.

The city gets $1.00 per ticket sold past 20K, all the concessions, and revenue from 10 of the luxury boxes (city gets two at no cost), and all the parking money.

Even after UTSA reimburses the city the agreed upon amount for staff and rent it still seems like a pretty good deal.  Now you know, if you want to support the school while at the game, don't just buy your beer and snacks. Get a t-shirt, foam finger, hat and other gear. That goes straight to the university.

-aztecskin.