The empty seats are costing UAB more than free tickets ever would

If you've watched a UAB football game on television this season, you know what the far side of Protective Stadium looks like.

Empty.

Section after section of seats with nobody in them, right there on camera throughout the game. It doesn't matter if there are 20,000 people there. The capacity is 47,100. The television picture tells a different story.

And the people seeing that picture include thousands of Birmingham-area families UAB needs to convince to come to a game.

Every time they see those empty seats, it reinforces the perception that nobody goes to UAB football games. And if nobody else wants to be there, why should they?

That's the cycle UAB needs to break. Andy Kennedy is taking steps to do it.

UAB's interim athletics director announced a new family-friendly ticket initiative this week — discounted admission for kids at football and basketball games, a Kids Takeover promotion for the Nov. 7 Charlotte game and a family ticket package. Tickets for kids 4-12 start at $15. Children 3 and under are free with a paying adult.

Good. Kennedy deserves credit for being aggressive about a problem that has gone largely unaddressed for years.

But I think the opportunity is much bigger than game-week promotions.

Sell the season before it starts

For homecoming, UAB offered free admission for kids 12 and under with an adult ticket and ran paid social advertising in key ZIP codes around Birmingham.

That's a good offer. But a well-targeted ad during game week is still asking a busy family to rearrange its Saturday on short notice.

Fall is chaos if you've got kids. Soccer, school projects, church, birthday parties — Saturdays fill up fast. By the time a parent sees the ad, the weekend is probably already spoken for.

And a social media ad reaches the parent. It doesn't reach the kid.

When a youth football coach tells his team they're all going to a UAB game together, those kids go home and won't shut up about it. Good luck telling a 9-year-old who's been counting down for three weeks that something came up.

That family is going to that game.

I've spent a decade in sales and 30 years covering college athletics. I think there's a straightforward way to get a lot more families into Protective Stadium.

Start in July.

Run a six-week outreach campaign before the season — phone calls, emails, face-to-face meetings with youth league presidents, school administrators, church coordinators, large employers, corporate partners and property managers of apartment communities.

People who can reach dozens or hundreds of families with a single conversation.

The offer: Buy one adult ticket at regular face value — let's use $25 — and get up to four free tickets for children 12 and under.

Let them choose any of UAB's six home games.

A youth league might organize a team outing. A school district might designate a Saturday for its students. An employer might buy tickets for its workers and their families, letting each family choose the game that works best.

Give them six weeks to consider the offer, coordinate schedules and make plans. The only deadline is that the promotion expires at kickoff of the first game.

And here's the important part: The goal is to sell the entire season's allotment before the season starts.

You're selling in July and August, when every team is undefeated, optimism is high and families are still making plans for the fall.

By September, the tickets are purchased. The games are on the calendar. The kids are counting down.

Meanwhile, UAB knows which organizations are coming to which games and can plan scoreboard recognition, group welcomes and other experiences around their visits.

And come November, you're not scrambling to find people willing to attend Senior Day after what might have been a disappointing season while competing against the biggest games of the season on TV.

You've already sold them their tickets.

The math works

I'd set a target of at least 2,000 new adult tickets sold for each of UAB's six home games.

At $25 apiece, that's $50,000 per game.

Across the season:

• 12,000 paid adult tickets.
• Up to 48,000 free children's tickets.
• Up to 60,000 total admissions.
• $300,000 in gross ticket revenue collected before the first kickoff.

That's a sales target, of course. Some families will bring fewer than four children, and some tickets won't be used. But the adult-ticket revenue is collected, and thousands of families have committed to attending.

Is 2,000 new adult tickets per game ambitious? Sure. But we're talking about a metropolitan area of more than a million people, with six weeks of personal outreach to organizations that already have relationships with thousands of families.

I'd be surprised if UAB is currently selling even 200 adult single-game tickets per game to the particular audience this campaign would target.

The potential incremental revenue is substantial. And that's before concessions, merchandise, parking or sponsorships.

This would run simultaneously with season-ticket campaigns, corporate group sales and traditional single-game sales. You're not replacing anything. You're adding an entire channel that doesn't exist right now.

When the television schedule drops and UAB learns it has a midweek national television game, don't wait until game week to promote it. Launch a two-week sprint immediately — special promotions, aggressive outreach to the same organizations, with the specific goal of filling that stadium for a national audience. You have the advantage of time and anticipation early. The closer you get to the game, the more you're competing against high school football, birthday parties, soccer games and everything else that fills a Thursday or Friday night in Birmingham.

That should be the takeaway from the Thursday night homecoming game against East Carolina. It was a great night. It would have been incredible with 10,000 more people there. You're not going to get those people with a spur-of-the-moment promotion. You're just not.

The family promotion serves a specific purpose: Get people into Protective Stadium who aren't coming now.

And if you reach the target, you've allocated up to 10,000 additional tickets for every home game before the season begins. That is a game-changer for UAB football.

The empty seats are devaluing the product

People will tell you giving away tickets devalues the product.

If you're Alabama, sure. Bryant-Denny fills up, demand is strong and giving away inventory people would otherwise purchase undercuts your ability to sell it. But UAB isn't Alabama, and neither are most schools in the Group of Six. Protective Stadium seats 47,100 people, and the Blazers have never filled it. A stadium with thousands of empty seats creates its own marketing problem — the crowd looks smaller on television, the atmosphere suffers and people watching at home have one more reason to stay home themselves.

The empty seats are what's devaluing the product. A 10-year-old who gets in free because his parent bought a $25 ticket was never coming anyway. Now he's there with a paying adult, his family is spending money on concessions and he's experiencing college football for what might be the first time.

Imagine a youth football team arriving at Protective Stadium together, wearing their jerseys. They see the band, watch the players warm up, cheer when UAB scores, get their pictures taken with Blaze. Their parents buy hot dogs. The kids have a great time — and they ask to come back. That's customer acquisition, not charity.

Put the people where the cameras can see them

I'd also put much of this new family-ticket inventory in the sections facing the television cameras — the sections that anyone who watches UAB football knows are often the emptiest part of the picture. Even when UAB draws a decent crowd, the camera angles can make the place look deserted.

Put several thousand families, youth football teams and school groups where the cameras can see them, and you've changed what Protective Stadium looks like on television. The people watching aren't just fans of the visiting team. They're people in Hoover, Trussville, Gardendale, Homewood, Vestavia Hills and throughout Birmingham — potential customers who could be sitting in those seats next Saturday. The image you're showing them on television is either pulling them in or pushing them away.

Show people having fun

UAB also needs to be more intentional about its photography, video, social media and marketing. The content should feature crowds, the student section, families cheering, kids meeting Blaze, tailgating in Uptown, people enjoying the restaurants and bars around the stadium — all kinds of people having a great time. Singles, families, retirees, young professionals, youth sports teams. People need to see themselves in the experience you're selling.

That includes confronting the safety perception. There are people throughout the Birmingham area who are reluctant to come downtown because they believe it's unsafe. You can argue with that perception all day, but it exists, and it influences decisions about where families spend their time and money. A press release telling people Protective Stadium is safe won't change many minds. Showing families arriving downtown, enjoying Uptown, attending a game and heading home after a great evening will. For years, UAB football has allowed negative narratives about attendance, losing seasons and downtown Birmingham to define much of its public image. When you aren't telling your own story, somebody else tells it for you. The best way to take control of that story is to put people in the stadium, give them a great experience and make sure the rest of Birmingham sees it.

Think beyond one Saturday

The $25 ticket gets a family through the gate once.

But a coordinated campaign like this also builds relationships with youth leagues, schools, churches, employers and community organizations. It creates opportunities to collect valuable customer information, with appropriate consent, from thousands of families UAB may never have reached before.

Now UAB knows who bought tickets, which games they selected and whether they attended. It has a way to continue the conversation — invite them to another game, offer basketball tickets, introduce them to other UAB athletic events.

Those organizational relationships don't disappear when football season ends. They become opportunities for future group outings, partnerships and ticket sales.

A child who falls in love with UAB football at age 9 might become a lifelong fan. His parents might become season-ticket holders. That family might eventually send a student to UAB.

The value of that relationship extends far beyond one ticket purchase. Every additional family improves the experience for the people already attending — a louder crowd, a fuller stadium, more activity around Uptown and a better television presentation all make UAB football more attractive to the next potential customer. That's the cycle working in your favor instead of against you.

A challenge for the Group of Six

I'd make this argument to almost every athletic department in the Group of Six.

Too many programs are protecting the theoretical value of tickets nobody is buying while the actual experience deteriorates in front of a television audience every Saturday.

Winning helps, but you can't build an attendance strategy around the assumption that your team will win eight or nine games every year. You have to create demand even when the team isn't winning, and you have to reach people who don't currently consider attending your games.

Lean into technology. The ability to execute high-scale outreach with a small team is exponentially greater today than it was even a year ago. At Diehard, I built a 5,000-contact database of the exact target audience for this kind of campaign in less than 15 minutes. Youth leagues, school administrators, church coordinators, community organizations — the people who can put families in seats. That list didn't exist 15 minutes earlier. The tools to build it and reach those contacts are available to any athletic department willing to use them.

Kennedy is on the right track. UAB's new family-friendly initiative is a welcome change after years when the program's marketing efforts seemed almost invisible.

But discounted youth tickets and game-week promotions are only a beginning.

Start earlier. Sell personally. Reach outside the existing fan base. Give families time to plan and commit. Collect the revenue before the season begins.

Then give those families an experience they'll want to repeat — and make sure the rest of Birmingham sees it.

Because the thousands of empty seats convincing everyone else to stay home are costing UAB far more than a free ticket for a kid ever will.