Overexposure

I was a season ticket holder at Kinnick stadium for twenty-four years. Yes, the tailgating was fun and during that span I went from being a big partying college kid to being the parent of one who would always stop by our parking spot to give his mother a hug and devour some free food before moving on. The party is fun, but I was there for the game. I loved the sights, sounds and smells of a football Saturday in Iowa City and while the winning teams were much more enjoyable to watch, I still enjoyed each and every game that I attended during that time span.

Toward the end of that twenty-four year run though I started noticing just how much the cost of this experience was going up. The cost of gas to get there, the price to park and of course the ticket prices just kept rising, but the one cost that finally put me over the top was when I was “required” to donate a certain amount each year in order to keep my “prime” seats. The ones where I sat next to two people who actually needed three seats and behind a fan who had spent the extra money to have a seat back installed so that I had absolutely no room to move as I looked straight down the back line of the end zone. Sure, those seats were worth another $200 a year each!

That winter I added things up and it was going to cost me $242 per game for my wife and I to continue to go to the football games in the same manner and the decision was made that, instead of buying season tickets, we would use the money saved to go to just the games that we wanted to and maybe even buy tickets where we were sitting on a yard line of some sort. That was the plan, but I soon discovered that with the Big Ten Network now in place, each and every Hawkeye football game was televised live and that I could watch from the comfort of my own easy chair at no additional cost to what I was already paying for my cable package. It wasn’t long before I was setting up the DVR and playing golf or doing yard work before starting to watch the game an hour or two later than kickoff. By speeding through the commercial breaks and halftime I was usually caught up to the live telecast by crunch time and I would find out who would win the game at the same time as I would have if I had left home at seven in the morning and spent over three hours wedged into a seat where I couldn’t move. It has been six years now and I have yet to have gone through with the original plan of buying a ticket on game day for a matchup that I felt was worth the money. No need to, as over those six years I have saved more than $10,000 and I have still seen every game. Sure I miss the sights, the sounds and the smells, but I am still getting to see the product.

So you are probably wondering where I am going with this…..

This morning I popped on to a message board that had a post questioning why the crowd was down at The Dream held at Eldora Speedway this past weekend and while the standard reasons such as poor economy, high gas prices and higher ticket prices were mentioned by many, one poster added in the reason that combined with all of those others quite possibly resulted in the decrease in attendance. “Pay per view and free internet sites where you can see the race shortly after it happens for free.” This year’s Dream had a live pay per view option that at first look seemed to be priced pretty high, but if a fan added up all of the costs involved of actually attending the race, it was likely quite a bargain. Then, the next day, subscribers to Dirt on Dirt were able to watch top quality video of the feature races with audio from the track announcers.  At least with pay per view I am assuming that the track gets a cut of the fee so it is still producing some revenue that can go toward the cost of running the show.  It is the free “next day” coverage that can be found of many events that in my opinion is already robbing tracks of paying customers that they might otherwise capture if their events were not so accessible online.

In a previous entry on the Back Stretch I provided a specific example of how one event has likely lost the price of two adult admission tickets that they had in the past and while some of you reading this now might be taking offense to this or thinking that I am full of it, I invite you to take a step back for a moment and think about it. At this point have you ever made the conscious decision to not make a trip to an event because you know that you will be able to see video of it the next day? You know, the radar looks a little iffy, it is a Thursday night, you can’t get off work until five and it is a two hour drive each way with your Friday morning alarm set for 6 a.m.? Ten years ago I still make that trip, but today with the price of gas, my need for sleep and the fact that I can probably see the feature race on the internet when I go home for lunch the next day, the choice is pretty obvious. And if you can honestly say that this has not yet entered into your decision making process, check back with me in another year or two and tell me that it still hasn’t.

The other side of the argument is still that someone watching these videos will then eventually make the trip to the track inspired by what they have seen. Yeah, I buy that to a certain extent and that is why I will still put a plug in here for a friend of the Back Stretch, FastTrackFan who shoots some pretty darn good videos using a hand held camera the size of a cell phone. Heck it might even be his cell phone as far as I know. When last week’s Deery/HDT show at Webster City was moved from Tuesday to Thursday because of rain, Craig’s videos were my only option for being able to see the show.

I just hope that videos like these do inspire more people to attend races in the future rather than being that one last reason to stay home. The Hawkeyes haven’t had any problem filling my vacant seat. Racing on the other hand already has too many seats that need to be filled.

Three straight nights of racing coming up with the Deery/HDT combo at Tipton tonight (Tuesday), the Free Grandstand Night at Oskaloosa on Wednesday followed by the Wapello County Fair Race at the Eldon Raceway on Thursday night. Hope to see you there!