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The Jets deserve a tremendous amount of credit for what they did yesterday. It was the right thing to do.
To paraphrase my old friend Chris Russo – Neil Glat got it done in a big spot.
Glat, the new team president fixed a mistake, a mistake that was made three years go; he lowered the prices of the worst seats in the stadium.
To charge $105 for these tickets was grossly unfair. It was so wrong.
“Gang Grange announced Thursday that it will slash ticket prices for about 12,000 seats in the 300 level of MetLife Stadium,” wrote Ebenezer Samuel in the Daily News. “The pricing adjustment will affect seats in the last 13 rows of the corner and end zone sections of the stadium. The last seven rows of four sections of sideline seats fall from $105 per game to $50 or $75, depending on the row. Seats in the corners and the end zones — formerly priced at $95 — drop to $75 in six rows and $50 in the last seven rows.”
In my travels around to different stadiums, I noticed upper deck seats in places like Detroit and Tampa Bay for under $40, and I kept thinking, “What are the Jets doing?”
The prices of big chunks of Jets seats, touching the heavens, were significantly out of touch with reality.
“After we looked at the 300 level, we decided to adjust the price to improve the value for fans, especially season-ticket holders,” Glat said. “Increasing the number of season-ticket holders in these areas makes sense. The NFL is built on season-ticket holders — they are the lifeblood of the stadium experience across the league. And we want more of them in the 300 level.”
This shows you the importance of some new blood at the top, a different perspective. It’s not that the old troika of VP’s didn’t do a lot of good thing. They certainly did.
But the arrival of Glat, a graduate of Penn’s Wharton School of Business and Harvard Law School (that is quite a combo), brought in a new set of eyes at the top of the organization, and he looked at the pricing in these sections, and decided it had to change.
Prior to this announcement, Woody Johnson and Bruce Speight made it clear to the media that they weren’t worried about selling out the stadium (i.e. blackouts).
Yes, the Jets could have worked things out to avoid blackouts, but just selling the tickets at a lower price, is a lot easier than the measures they might have had to resort to, otherwise.
Let’s say they had 7,000 tickets left for a particular game, and the blackout deadline was nearing, the Jets could buy up each ticket at 37 cents on the dollar, and the game would be on television.
How often do you really think Woody wants to do that?
Also, there is no question, especially with the Sanchez-Tebow intrigue, they could sell enough tickets, game-to-game, piecemeal, to avoid a sellout. There are a lot of fans, especially in this rough economy, that just want to go to a game or two, not commit to a full season.
So instead of buying up the seats themselves, or patching together individual sellouts, they’d rather just sell the seats on a season ticket basis, and not have to jump through hoops to concoct a sellout each week.
And with the new pricing, there is a good chance they will be able sell out those seats, especially in the #1 market in the country, a hugely populated area.
Kudos to Glat for this bold move.
(We will have Part II of our analysis of the Jets’ new ticket plan on Saturday by 9 pm.)