Should South Alabama Consider Playing The 2020 Football Season At Ladd-Peebles Stadium?
On Tuesday South Alabama Director of Athletics Joel Erdmann was a guest on some local sports talk radio programs. Erdmann spoke about the Jags scheduling complications caused by the Southwest Athletic Conference’s (SWAC) decision to postpone their football season to spring 2021 due to Covid-19.
South Alabama and Grambling State were scheduled to face off on September 12 in Mobile as the grand opening of Hancock Whitney Stadium, the Jaguars brand new on-campus stadium. Now the Jaguars are scrambling in an attempt to schedule another team to fill the gap in their schedule. Otherwise the Jags will open the new stadium against UAB on September 26th as long as the remainder of the non-conference schedule is unaffected by the pandemic.
Erdmann also spoke about stadium capacity with the current social distancing considerations in place.
Brace yourselves, we are about to start talking numbers. A lot of numbers and percentages.
He said, if the season started today, that Hancock Whitney capacity would be limited to about 25% of the 25,000 seat capacity of the new stadium. This breaks down to about 6,250 potential fans in the stadium. This is predicated on a strict 1-in-4 seat occupancy, which may not be attainable in all sections of the stadium.
The actual capacity may be lower.
For the sake of this article, we’ll assume a maximum capacity of 6,000 as a nice, round number.
The lowest attended game of the 2019 season was against Memphis when the official attendance was 12,373. We are looking at less than half the attendance of the least attended game last season.
Who will get to attend the game?
Among season ticket holders the Priority Points System will be utilized, as was used recently when choosing seating locations at Hancock Whitney Stadium was being sorted out.
But what about the families of student-athletes?
What about students, who pay an athletics fee which allows them to attend football games for free? Let’s assume the administration sets aside 10% capacity for students to attend, which would be 600 seats.
Assuming you allow for two family members per student-athlete and a maximum of 125 student-athletes on a team, that’s 250 seats.
Then do you allow the travel team any tickets at all? At a minimum let’s say you allow two tickets per opponent student-athlete to be fair. With a maximum travel roster of 70 student-athletes, that’s another 140 seats
Based on these numbers: 600 seats for students, 250 for Jaguar football player families, 140 for opponent football player families we get 990 seats. Again for round numbers, lets allocate 10 more seats to make it an even 1,000.
That further reduces the available tickets to Hancock Whitney to 5,000 for season ticket holders.
That is 5,000 seats before we even talk about the families of coaches and staff getting seats to the game.
Now this is a radical idea to throw against the wall but lets do it for conversation: If we have to reduce occupancy to 25%, what if we play another season at Ladd-Peebles stadium?
If we do not use the end zone tarps over the seats like in seasons past, the stadium occupancy is 40,000. If we also reduce it to 25% capacity, we now have 10,000 potential seats. (Since 10,000 is a nice round number, we’re going to use that for Ladd-Peebles, but it may be slightly lower as well since some areas may not be able to ahere to the strict 25% reduction with proper social distancing, etc.)
That is 40% more available seating for Jaguar home games.
Again if we allocate those same 1,000 seats to students, and home and away team families then add 10 to make it an even number, we now have 9,000 available seats for season ticket holders.
Now we are talking 80% more tickets available for fans to attend Jaguar home games in 2020.
Just think, we haven’t even allocated ANY tickets to major sponsors or corporations yet!
Now I know, if you have read this far already, you are thinking something along the lines of “Why would we build a nice on-campus stadium and not utilize it, TJ?!” And you’d be right to do so. But as it has been stated to us in many forms, we are living during an unprecedented situation and South Alabama is in a unique position being able to even have this discussion. Not all schools have a large, while aged, stadium in the same city that could be utilized to boost attendance in this unique time.
What if you are not one of those lucky 5,000 to be able to see ANY of the Jaguar home games in 2020? You have an 80% better chance of being able to attend a game if there is now 9,000 tickets available than 5,000.
Plus would you rather delay the grand opening of Hancock Whitney Stadium to 2021 when, hopefully, we would be able to have 25,000 (or more) crowd into the brand new stadium and give it the grand opening it deserves?
I’m not even taking into account the post-season bowl games played in Mobile. The only one that has committed to play at Hancock Whitney Stadium is the Senior Bowl, and we are so far removed from the game that we don’t even know if it will happen or not.
I guess it boils down to which is the better option for a pandemic-affected 2020 season? A more comfortable but less attended 2020 season OR what we’ve had for the previous 11 season but potentially open to more attendees?
What do you think?