Yulman Stadium (Benson Field)

[mbawavefan12]

Regarding the cost of Yulman..several factors have to be considered;

Tulane had zero cost to acquire the land

Tulane had zero cost for a home locker room to be included in the stadium

Infrastructure was for the most part already in place, cost was mitigated

Tulane had zero cost to provide parking... (either spaces or a full parking lot)

Am i happy with the finished product, especially the west side of the stadium..HELL NO..but it is what it is, and we are stuck with it

Good points and I agree we have to focus on making the best out of an imperfect situation.

[jonathanjoseph]

Also, on this news that season tickets are flying off the shelves, where are those posters (read: most of you) who insisted it would take DECADES to get fans back.

We haven't even had a decent team yet. Imagine what happens if CJ has this program rolling in another year or two, which seems like a good bet.

[jonathanjoseph]

You do know that Stanford and Palo Alto are in "no where" California being 35 miles from San Francisco?

Considering I lived in SF while commuting to an office that was 1/4 mile from the Stanford campus for over seven years, I'd say I'm pretty familiar with the situation. Meanwhile, the 49ers stadium that has moved from slightly outside of SF to closer to 35 miles south has ruffled a lot of feathers.

[JerseyWave]

In Rick Dickson's latest Wave Chat released yesterday(6/19) he states there are less than 4,000 season tickets remaining. In this case he should know precisely how many seats are available in Cow/Dick Stadium! Is anyone buying season tickets for Standing Room Only? In fact, Dickson has probably known for well over a year how many seats are available. Stop the spin and tell the embarrassing truth about the Stadium's seating capacity!

[golfnut69]

In Rick Dickson's latest Wave Chat released yesterday(6/19) he states there are less than 4,000 season tickets remaining. In this case he should know precisely how many seats are available in Cow/Dick Stadium! Is anyone buying season tickets for Standing Room Only? In fact, Dickson has probably known for well over a year how many seats are available. Stop the spin and tell the embarrassing truth about the Stadium's seating capacity!

The issue...there were only 4500 available to begin with

[golfnut69]

JJ....Dallas is filled with Alumni from Oklahoma..Texas AM....Texas Tech...hell the Texas Tech full week end alumni festivities & fund raiser Golf Tournament is played in north Dallas at the Cowboy CC...Austin is filled with alumni from Tech and A&M...Hell, Austin politics and major Business are run by A&M grads !..as the ole joke goes, what does a UT grad call and A&M grad, one year after graduating ?.... "BOSS"....

Right. UNT is 35 miles from the closest urban center and is no better than the fourth or fifth most popular D1A program (and that's being kind) in that urban center and they still spent more money on a stadium with a larger capacity. If that doesn't illustrate the absurdity I don't know what will.

ing and sophistication

JJ...University of North Texas average 1013 football attendance....21,300 .. the average attendance for that bastion of higher learning and sophistication SMU,17885

and if you really want to head to "nowhere Texas" find (if U can) Bryant-College Station home of Texas A&M...which is not far from it's better know closest city Brenham..know for it's JUCO football factory and Blue Bell Ice Cream... regarding College Station, the city council proposed a name change for the city...Texas A&M is now a university, not a college and the train no longer stops, so there is no "station"...the winning name change entry came for a UT co-ed.. the new name was "Malfunction Junction"

[Fred Dowler]

In Rick Dickson's latest Wave Chat released yesterday(6/19) he states there are less than 4,000 season tickets remaining. In this case he should know precisely how many seats are available in Cow/Dick Stadium! Is anyone buying season tickets for Standing Room Only? In fact, Dickson has probably known for well over a year how many seats are available. Stop the spin and tell the embarrassing truth about the Stadium's seating capacity!

The issue...there were only 4500 available to begin with

Bingo.

[jonathanjoseph]

JJ....Dallas is filled with Alumni from Oklahoma..Texas AM....Texas Tech...hell the Texas Tech full week end alumni festivities & fund raiser Golf Tournament is played in north Dallas at the Cowboy CC...Austin is filled with alumni from Tech and A&M...Hell, Austin politics and major Business are run by A&M grads !..as the ole joke goes, what does a UT grad call and A&M grad, one year after graduating ?.... "BOSS"....

Right. UNT is 35 miles from the closest urban center and is no better than the fourth or fifth most popular D1A program (and that's being kind) in that urban center and they still spent more money on a stadium with a larger capacity. If that doesn't illustrate the absurdity I don't know what will.

ing and sophistication

JJ...University of North Texas average 1013 football attendance....21,300 .. the average attendance for that bastion of higher learning and sophistication SMU,17885

and if you really want to head to "nowhere Texas" find (if U can) Bryant-College Station home of Texas A&M...which is not far from it's better know closest city Brenham..know for it's JUCO football factory and Blue Bell Ice Cream... regarding College Station, the city council proposed a name change for the city...Texas A&M is now a university, not a college and the train no longer stops, so there is no "station"...the winning name change entry came for a UT co-ed.. the new name was "Malfunction Junction"

I have no idea what point you are trying to make. If you do capacity planning around a university's attendance in a given year then Tulane could have built a 7K capacity stadium and been just fine.

[Fred Dowler]

Also, on this news that season tickets are flying off the shelves, where are those posters (read: most of you) who insisted it would take DECADES to get fans back.

We haven't even had a decent team yet. Imagine what happens if CJ has this program rolling in another year or two, which seems like a good bet.

The deal is, though, for one, as we all know, it's always a good idea to take whatever Rick Dickson and company announce with a nice grain of salt and then, second, for a couple of years or so the facility is going to be a novelty and people are going to be curious about it and the effect of that is going to be impacting on ticket sales. That effect is going to wear off eventually, but only when it does will you really be able to get a good reading on how responsive the public is going to be to TU/American Conf. football (and which largely is the same item as "old C-USA" football minus Louisville, TCU and Southern Miss -- and we already have an idea of what people think of that product). Which is why it the sound approach for TU to have taken would have been for TU to have focused first on building up a solid consistent-winner program on the field while still playing in the Superdome and then have had the better gauge on the fan following with which to plan for the future (whether that would have meant an on-campus and smaller stadium or an off-campus and larger stadium).

[Eaglewave]

The visiting side is F'n horrible!!!!!!!!!

[JDTulane]

The visiting side is F'n horrible!!!!!!!!!

Broken record much?

[JTLiuzza]

The deal is, though, for one, as we all know, it's always a good idea to take whatever Rick Dickson and company announce with a nice grain of salt and then, second, for a couple of years or so the facility is going to be a novelty and people are going to be curious about it and the effect of that is going to be impacting on ticket sales. That effect is going to wear off eventually, but only when it does will you really be able to get a good reading on how responsive the public is going to be to TU/American Conf. football (and which largely is the same item as "old C-USA" football minus Louisville, TCU and Southern Miss -- and we already have an idea of what people think of that product). Which is why it the sound approach for TU to have taken would have been for TU to have focused first on building up a solid consistent-winner program on the field while still playing in the Superdome and then have had the better gauge on the fan following with which to plan for the future (whether that would have meant an on-campus and smaller stadium or an off-campus and larger stadium).

As far as season ticket sales, or anything else for that matter, I don't believe anything coming out of the Wilson Center or Gibson Hall.

Our tied-at-the-hip conference mate SMU built a spanking new stadium in time for the 2000 season. I've never been there but, from what I gather, it is nicer than what Yulman projects to be. Like us, SMU had been a dismal football program for a long time, killing their fan base. Here's what happened in SMU's first season in their new stadium:

Kansas ( 9/2 ) - 32,267 W 31-17
At UTEP (9/9) L 20-37
At NC St. (9/16) L 0-41
Tulane ( 9/23 ) - 26,375 L 17-29 Down 18.3%
At Houston (9/30) L 15-17
San Jose St. ( 10/7 ) - 16,821 L 10-35 Down 47.9%
At Hawaii (10/14) L 15-30
Nevada ( 10/28 ) - 14,747 W 21-7 Down 54.3%
At Rice (11/4) L 14-43
Tulsa ( 11/11 ) - 14,127 W 24-20 Down 56.2%
At Fresno State (11/18) L 7-14
Texas Christian ( 11/24 ) - 26,551 L 7-62 Down 17.7%

They had capacity attendance for the first game (novelty effect), in which they actually won, and didn't fill the stadium again.

They lost a lot after game one so folks knew that they were still dealing with the same bad SMU football just in a spanking new venue; so they bailed.

I know we're coming off a bowl season, albeit one in which we gained the requisite number of wins against probably the weakest football schedule for Tulane since probably the 1920's. But that can only add to interest.

They can talk about ticket sales all day. But if the team doesn't win this season - early, they will see a repeat of what SMU experienced: capacity crowd for the home opener, and that's it. The game day atmosphere and great tailgating (if indeed that's what we'll have) alone doesn't put butts in the seats. The Gormley experiment proved that.

I hope they rack up the W's and make a TU football ticket a hot commodity. As others have said though, that will make perfectly clear before season one is even over that they built too small.

[Fred Dowler]

The deal is, though, for one, as we all know, it's always a good idea to take whatever Rick Dickson and company announce with a nice grain of salt and then, second, for a couple of years or so the facility is going to be a novelty and people are going to be curious about it and the effect of that is going to be impacting on ticket sales. That effect is going to wear off eventually, but only when it does will you really be able to get a good reading on how responsive the public is going to be to TU/American Conf. football (and which largely is the same item as "old C-USA" football minus Louisville, TCU and Southern Miss -- and we already have an idea of what people think of that product). Which is why it the sound approach for TU to have taken would have been for TU to have focused first on building up a solid consistent-winner program on the field while still playing in the Superdome and then have had the better gauge on the fan following with which to plan for the future (whether that would have meant an on-campus and smaller stadium or an off-campus and larger stadium).

As far as season ticket sales, or anything else for that matter, I don't believe anything coming out of the Wilson Center or Gibson Hall.

Our tied-at-the-hip conference mate SMU built a spanking new stadium in time for the 2000 season. I've never been there but, from what I gather, it is nicer than what Yulman projects to be. Like us, SMU had been a dismal football program for a long time, killing their fan base. Here's what happened in SMU's first season in their new stadium:

Kansas ( 9/2 ) - 32,267 W 31-17
At UTEP (9/9) L 20-37
At NC St. (9/16) L 0-41
Tulane ( 9/23 ) - 26,375 L 17-29 Down 18.3%
At Houston (9/30) L 15-17
San Jose St. ( 10/7 ) - 16,821 L 10-35 Down 47.9%
At Hawaii (10/14) L 15-30
Nevada ( 10/28 ) - 14,747 W 21-7 Down 54.3%
At Rice (11/4) L 14-43
Tulsa ( 11/11 ) - 14,127 W 24-20 Down 56.2%
At Fresno State (11/18) L 7-14
Texas Christian ( 11/24 ) - 26,551 L 7-62 Down 17.7%

They had capacity attendance for the first game (novelty effect), in which they actually won, and didn't fill the stadium again.

They lost a lot after game one so folks knew that they were still dealing with the same bad SMU football just in a spanking new venue; so they bailed.

I know we're coming off a bowl season, albeit one in which we gained the requisite number of wins against probably the weakest football schedule for Tulane since probably the 1920's. But that can only add to interest.

They can talk about ticket sales all day. But if the team doesn't win this season - early, they will see a repeat of what SMU experienced: capacity crowd for the home opener, and that's it. The game day atmosphere and great tailgating (if indeed that's what we'll have) alone doesn't put butts in the seats. The Gormley experiment proved that.

I hope they rack up the W's and make a TU football ticket a hot commodity. As others have said though, that will make perfectly clear before season one is even over that they built too small.

Hear, hear. Tremendous points raised.

Some posters seem almost to be acting like that we as regular alumni should be doing cartwheels over how well ticket sales are going. Look, the only thing that really matters, the only thing that I as an average alum cares about is what happens on the field. Who you play and who you beat, if anybody, and how consistently you win. Ticket sales right now at a time when the program hasn't shown more than the sole 7-6 season and against a less-than-challenging schedule only really equate to revenue that the athletics department is getting to pick up without having had to completely prove that they're all about winning on the field and against tough competition. If you take a good look at SMU's situation even today, you can see that they still haven't drawn very well unless the opponent has been one to be a solid turn-on to fans.

And, for sure, always, always take whatever comes out of Wilson Center and Gibson Hall with a large grain of salt.

[CougarRed]

In Rick Dickson's latest Wave Chat released yesterday(6/19) he states there are less than 4,000 season tickets remaining.

Very impressive!! I wish we at Houston only had 4,000 season tickets left to sell!!

[Eaglewave]

The visiting side is F'n horrible!!!!!!!!!

Broken record much?

The visiting side is F'n horrible!!!!!!!!

[tpstulane]

In Rick Dickson's latest Wave Chat released yesterday(6/19) he states there are less than 4,000 season tickets remaining.

Very impressive!! I wish we at Houston only had 4,000 season tickets left to sell!!

Tulane has completely underestimated it's potential market. For one the school has had a bad product for the majority of the last 35 years. All one has to do is look what winning has done for the Saints, LSU and ULL. There was a time when you couldn't give away Saints tickets as now there's a waiting list for over 70,000. It was a running joke told by the late nola sportscaster Buddy D that when he parked his car he'd leave a pair of Saints tickets on his windshield only to come back and find four. LSU had attendance problems during the days of Curly H and Gerry D prior to Nick Saban. ULL couldn't draw flies pre Mark H but now they are expanding their stadium. South Louisiana is crazy for football. You just have to give people a good product to go see. Something Tulane has only done a handful of times over the last 40 years. If we continue to build on last season's success the stadium will easily sellout in future seasons. Tulane and ULL together sold over 54K in the Superdome and set a new attendance record for the New Orleans Bowl this past season. However if we fail to have continued success the current Yulman stadium will be more than enough.

[Robert1969]

ULL couldn't draw flies pre Mark H but now they are expanding their stadium.

Why? Even now they hardly sell out their stadium. Its highest attendance was 29,758 in 2012 in their 31,000 seat stadium. Every other game that year had less than 26,000 with most around 20,000. In 2013 they got over 28,000 twice with every other game below 25,500. Yes, that's really good for the Sunbelt, but so long as they are in the Sunbelt, they will never need more than 31,000. I guess they can expand just in case the Big XII decides it needs to be in the Lafayette market. But short of that what do they need a bigger stadium for?

2013 ULL Attendance 25,976

[Fred Dowler]

Tulane has completely underestimated it's potential market.

Not at all.

TU very deliberately opted to move to a dramatically smaller facility in the hope that they could be able to have some leverage with which to force alumni to make a commitment in terms of donations, etc. that would be revenue with which to reduce the university subsidy to athletics.

And then now the Wilson Center is pumping out "tickets are going fast..." reports like crazy.

The game plan has clearly been to put the squeeze on the fans' wallets even though the only thing that the program has done has been to come up with a single 7-win season against a pretty watered-down schedule.

As I'm sure that everyone or almost everyone can remember Tommy Bowden talking about "deceipt, deception and trickery," well, even though Rick Dickson was not yet on the TU campus at the time, somewhere, no doubt, he was listening and taking notes.

[ArtVandelay]

Ed Daniels interviewed Brandon MacNeil of Tulane during a story he ran on Yulman Friday night. MacNeil said TU was hoping to end up with 15,000 - 18,000 full priced season ticket holders, and that 95% of the Glazer Club was sold out.

So I guess to get the real seating capacity you would add the visitor and student sections to the full priced ticket holders. Don't know what that number is but getting up to 25,000 seems like a stretch to me.

Also, I heard Arnie Fielkow interviewed on The Three Tailgaters show on Saturday and he commented that he was excited that TU was moving back on campus, but expressed concerns about the small size of the stadium. Also said TU was a sleeping giant athletically. He also hopes to return to New Orleans one day - I hope it's as TU's new athletic director.

[Fred Dowler]

Ed Daniels interviewed Brandon MacNeil of Tulane during a story he ran on Yulman Friday night. MacNeil said TU was hoping to end up with 15,000 - 18,000 full priced season ticket holders, and that 95% of the Glazer Club was sold out.

So I guess to get the real seating capacity you would add the visitor and student sections to the full priced ticket holders. Don't know what that number is but getting up to 25,000 seems like a stretch to me.

Also, I heard Arnie Fielkow interviewed on The Three Tailgaters show on Saturday and he commented that he was excited that TU was moving back on campus, but expressed concerns about the small size of the stadium. Also said TU was a sleeping giant athletically. He also hopes to return to New Orleans one day - I hope it's as TU's new athletic director.

My guess is about 1000 seats for fans of visiting teams (I'm pretty sure that they've made it clear that selling a lot of seats to the fans of visiting teams is not a high priority) and about 4000-4500 for students. Ergo, that added with the season ticket seating equates to total seating=somewhere between 23-25,000.

[Robert1969]

Ed Daniels interviewed Brandon MacNeil of Tulane during a story he ran on Yulman Friday night. MacNeil said TU was hoping to end up with 15,000 - 18,000 full priced season ticket holders, and that 95% of the Glazer Club was sold out.

So I guess to get the real seating capacity you would add the visitor and student sections to the full priced ticket holders. Don't know what that number is but getting up to 25,000 seems like a stretch to me.

Also, I heard Arnie Fielkow interviewed on The Three Tailgaters show on Saturday and he commented that he was excited that TU was moving back on campus, but expressed concerns about the small size of the stadium. Also said TU was a sleeping giant athletically. He also hopes to return to New Orleans one day - I hope it's as TU's new athletic director.

My guess is about 1000 seats for fans of visiting teams (I'm pretty sure that they've made it clear that selling a lot of seats to the fans of visiting teams is not a high priority) and about 4000-4500 for students. Ergo, that added with the season ticket seating equates to total seating=somewhere between 23-25,000.

I don't think there'll be that many student tickets. I don't think they are overly concerned about visiting fans so much as making a decent number of single game tickets available to grow the base of paying fans and keep pressure on season ticket holders to renew. I figured they'd try to sell somewhere around 20,000 season tickets, have about 2500 student tickets 1,000 visitor tickets and 3500 single game tickets.

But, of course, there are mixed signals coming from the Wilson Center on season ticket sales.

[lurker123]

The stadium seating math has all been good fun posting amid idle speculation while awaiting football season to start. However most of it points to the original announced capacity of 25k to 30k including SRO. Also we have to believe our lying eyes and there are only so many folks you can jam into the Yulman space now that its dimensions have been built out and explicitly defined as has been ably pointed out above. I still incline to 27,500 but as I said who cares as long as it is all used and provides a great stadium experience.

One other advantage to selling say 17,000 "full priced" season tickets is not only is that number the most in decades but perhaps 80%?? will have attached personal seat licenses (either direct or indirect.) I still believe the stadium will be fully paid for ultimately by donors (all tbd and just my opinion.) If so the enhanced ticket revenue, the "PSL" fees (or whatever you wish to call these mandatory "donations") and concessions (and a little parking from Diboll and Rosen?) will provide significantly increased revenue to Athletics.

What we have to insist upon is that meanwhile the University NOT use this as an excuse to reduce the subsidy from general funds but rather use it as an opportunity to increase overall investment in athletics.

[jonathanjoseph]

In Rick Dickson's latest Wave Chat released yesterday(6/19) he states there are less than 4,000 season tickets remaining.

Very impressive!! I wish we at Houston only had 4,000 season tickets left to sell!!

Tulane has completely underestimated it's potential market. For one the school has had a bad product for the majority of the last 35 years. All one has to do is look what winning has done for the Saints, LSU and ULL. There was a time when you couldn't give away Saints tickets as now there's a waiting list for over 70,000. It was a running joke told by the late nola sportscaster Buddy D that when he parked his car he'd leave a pair of Saints tickets on his windshield only to come back and find four. LSU had attendance problems during the days of Curly H and Gerry D prior to Nick Saban. ULL couldn't draw flies pre Mark H but now they are expanding their stadium. South Louisiana is crazy for football. You just have to give people a good product to go see. Something Tulane has only done a handful of times over the last 40 years. If we continue to build on last season's success the stadium will easily sellout in future seasons. Tulane and ULL together sold over 54K in the Superdome and set a new attendance record for the New Orleans Bowl this past season. However if we fail to have continued success the current Yulman stadium will be more than enough.

Absolutely correct. +1000.

[Fred Dowler]

Ed Daniels interviewed Brandon MacNeil of Tulane during a story he ran on Yulman Friday night. MacNeil said TU was hoping to end up with 15,000 - 18,000 full priced season ticket holders, and that 95% of the Glazer Club was sold out.

So I guess to get the real seating capacity you would add the visitor and student sections to the full priced ticket holders. Don't know what that number is but getting up to 25,000 seems like a stretch to me.

Also, I heard Arnie Fielkow interviewed on The Three Tailgaters show on Saturday and he commented that he was excited that TU was moving back on campus, but expressed concerns about the small size of the stadium. Also said TU was a sleeping giant athletically. He also hopes to return to New Orleans one day - I hope it's as TU's new athletic director.

My guess is about 1000 seats for fans of visiting teams (I'm pretty sure that they've made it clear that selling a lot of seats to the fans of visiting teams is not a high priority) and about 4000-4500 for students. Ergo, that added with the season ticket seating equates to total seating=somewhere between 23-25,000.

I don't think there'll be that many student tickets. I don't think they are overly concerned about visiting fans so much as making a decent number of single game tickets available to grow the base of paying fans and keep pressure on season ticket holders to renew. I figured they'd try to sell somewhere around 20,000 season tickets, have about 2500 student tickets 1,000 visitor tickets and 3500 single game tickets.

But, of course, there are mixed signals coming from the Wilson Center on season ticket sales.

That's an enormous number for single-game tickets for TU to just leave aside (and unavailable( right now for just that purpose when they're pushing hard to sell those season tickets. I'd figure that that figure is in fact zero, or at least that Rick Dickson et al. are trying to make it zero, if possible. No doubt that what they would most like to do is sell everything outside of the student area, the area for fans of the visiting team and a small area for coaches, high school athletes, etc. as a season ticket and that's what they're aiming at. They'd love to be able to say "well, if you didn't buy season tickets that's just too bad...you're left out...." Consider also that there's supposed to be some kind of ticket exchange set up to allow for tickets purchased as a season ticket to not go unused. Ergo, when they're saying that they're hoping to sell as many as 18,000 season tickets, well, that may well be revealing something.

Also, I'm basing my figure w/r/t tickets for students on that the student section is supposed to be the south end zone, which I am figuring holds about 4500.

[jonathanjoseph]

ULL couldn't draw flies pre Mark H but now they are expanding their stadium.

Why? Even now they hardly sell out their stadium. Its highest attendance was 29,758 in 2012 in their 31,000 seat stadium. Every other game that year had less than 26,000 with most around 20,000. In 2013 they got over 28,000 twice with every other game below 25,500. Yes, that's really good for the Sunbelt, but so long as they are in the Sunbelt, they will never need more than 31,000. I guess they can expand just in case the Big XII decides it needs to be in the Lafayette market. But short of that what do they need a bigger stadium for?

2013 ULL Attendance 25,976

Because they are playing in the Sun Belt. The equation for college football attendance is quality of program/team + quality of opponent = attendance. 25K attendance in the Sun Belt is an easy 35K against a better schedule which means they need a 45K stadium, as they are targeting.