EMQB NFL Blogcast

Dolphins Struggling to Sell Tickets

by David Kindervater on September 7th, 2008

National Football League Blogcast, NFL Blogcast

As I was perusing the early games today, one glance into the crowd at the Dolphins-Jets game would tell you it was anything but a sellout. Yet I reported a couple days ago that every game on this Kickoff Weekend was announced as a sellout. So what’s the deal? Here’s a really long-winded but thorough explanation from Dolphins VP of Media Relations Harvey Greene:

“Our sellout figure has always been determined by the seats sold in the lower and upper bowls, and not the club seat and suite locations. The reason for that is that not all stadiums have club seats so those seats aren’t counted in the blackout determination in order to keep an ‘apples to apples’ comparison in how a blackout is determined. The visiting team seats are located in various places around the stadium, including both the upper and lower bowls. It’s not surprising you can get eight seats together because that allotment is basically a series of blocks of tickets located in various locations, including both the upper and lower bowls. In fact, you would probably have better luck getting a group of tickets together from the visiting allotment upstairs (since those are always the last to be bought by the opposing players for their families, friends, etc.) than the better seats downstairs. Usually we get the visiting team tickets back by Thursday or Friday (after the blackout determination date) and then put them on sale to the public right after that. In some cases, especially later in the year when teams (especially those up north) like coming down here because of the weather, the visiting team doesn’t return any tickets, and in other cases (most typically early in the year when the weather is hot) they do, as happened this week.”

Uh, ok? I would eventually find out that there were some 15,000 empty seats. And the South Florida Sun-Sentinel is reporting that season ticket sales are down for the Dolphins. Big surprise. I guess crappy football and rising ticket prices will do that to a fan. But no one said this rebuilding process would be easy.

Sources: ProFootballTalk.com, Sun-Sentinel.com, Yahoo! Sports

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POSTED IN: Miami Dolphins