All of this talk about selling out LES is funny to me. For some reason, fans have decided that selling every seat in a stadium is a sign of a program's health. This is laughable. If every seat is sold out to every game, and I'm a team owner, I'm doing a poor job running my business.

Here's a case study for you. When I was younger, I decided to try and make some money on ebay. I did some research and saw that replica lightsabers sold really well. I dropped $3k and bought a bunch of lightsabers from a wholesaler. I then listed my first lightsaber at a little lower than some of the other lightsabers had sold for recently. It sold in a couple of hours. I then started listing multiple lightsabers at a time, and I would sell about 1 or 2 a day, and on each sale, I would make about $10. I was pretty excited, and thought that the fact that these lightsabers were selling so fast was a sign of a great business. However, after a couple weeks of this, I finally wised up, and decided that I should experiment with the price. I slowly started increasing the price of the lightsabers. They typically wouldn't sell as fast, but they would still sell within the week. I ended up selling about 1 lightsaber a week, but I was making close to $100 off that one sale. I wasn't doing as much volume, but I was doing more revenue, and it was a lot less work for me in the process (I only had to ship 1 a week instead of 7). I now kick myself for selling those initial lightsabers for so cheap. I left a lot of money on the table because I didn't understand what the real objective was.

Selling seats to a sporting venue is very similar. It's easy to get caught up and think that the VOLUME of tickets sold is the goal. However, if that were the goal, it would be pretty easy to achieve, simply take the cost of running the event, divide it by 64,000 and sell the tickets at that price. I'm pretty sure LES would sell out if tickets were all $5. However, volume of tickets is not the goal of the Athletic Department, maximizing PROFIT is. I won't get into the concept of Price Elasticity of Demand in detail, but suffice it to say, that selling 55,000 tickets at $40 >>>> selling 64,000 at $30.

I'll go ahead and address ancillary revenue (such as parking and concessions). I'm sure these things have been included in the Athletic Deparmtment's analysis. In fact, I'm sure that pricing has been experimented with as well to see how much people will pay for parking, and for concessions in order to maximize that profit as well.

Ofcourse, I think the future will be that the online ticketing system will become more like an auctioning platform, where pricing is constantly changing to meet current levels of demand in an attempt to make even more.