KANSAN.COM / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 2010 / SPORTS
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TICKET SCANDAL
NCAA, colleges align with ticket brokers
ASSOCIATED PRESS
College sports fans searching for a coveted ticket to a sold-out game can bypass the shady guys hanging outside the stadiums and arenas. Just try your favorite school's website. Or go straight to the NCAA.
A scalping scheme at the University of Kansas has exposed the seamy side of the secondary ticket business, with five now-former athletic department employees and a consultant accused of keeping the profits from selling as much as $3 million worth of basketball and football tickets to brokers. A federal grand jury is reviewing the case.
The Kansas case is a rare black eye for an industry that has grown in both size but also legitimacy.
A 2008 Forrester Research report values the secondary ticket market for live entertainment — pro and college sports plus concerts — at $4.5 billion annually, or roughly 20 percent of the primary ticket business.
Other estimates peg the annual secondary market as high as $10 billion. Industry leaders say as many as 30 percent of concert and sporting event tickets wind up on the secondary market.
The industry has its own lobbying group, the National Association of Ticket Brokers. The trade association and other industry groups hold annual summits at Las Vegas casinos and the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. And its political influence has led to an across-the-board decline of state and local anti-scalping laws, as
well as greater cultural acceptance of ticket resales.
The NCAA in 2007 enlisted the Razorgator online exchange service as its "official ticket and hospitality package provider" for the men's Final Four. The deal has since
been extended to include the women's Final Four, the College World Series, Frozen Four hockey tournament and the remaining four rounds of March Madness.
That means ticket sellers and buyers — fans or professional brokers playing the market — can ply their trade online under the NCAA's seal of approval. Alumni whose school loses in the semifinals can pawn their championship game tickets at the Razorgator table inside the stadium.
"It acknowledges reality. Our goal is to provide a legitamate, safe, guaranteed means by which those transactions occur."
also allows the NCAA to limit ticket fraud.
GREG SHAHEEN NCAA senior vice president
"It acknowledges reality," Shaheen said. "Our goal is to provide a legitimate, safe, guaranteed means by which transactions occur."
Need tickets and a hotel room for the 2011 Final Four in Houston? A shade under $1,900 will get you an upper-level seat in Reliant Stadium, four nights at a nearby Marriott, a souvenir program and admission to a pre-game hospitality tent with food buffets and an open bar.
Greg Shaheen, an NCAA senior vice president, said the association was tired of watching secondary market ticket sellers profit off the NCAA's name and reputation. He said the partnership with Razorgator
Razorgator charges sellers and
buyers an administrative fee. Shaheen declined to disclose the specifics of the NCAA&multiyear contract with the company.
Individual schools are also increasingly turning to Web-driven ticket exchanges to
complement box office sales.
Ticket reseller StubHub, a division of eBay, counts 13 schools among its officials partners, including Alabama, Louisville, Purdue, Stanford, USC and Wisconsin. Other schools team with industry giant Ticketmaster or provide their own programs, which sometimes are restricted to donors and season-ticket holders.
At the StubHub school sites, ticket holders can sell their extras or average Joes can buy the finest seats in the house. So Trojan fans eager to watch USC face Virginia in the Sept. 11 home opener can buy a seat inside the Los Angeles Coliseum for just $39. High-rollers looking for a 50-yard line perch for the late November game against Notre Dame can expect to pay $3,000.
BY RYAN ESHOFF Daily Bruin U. California-Los Angeles
COLLEGE WORLD SERIES
"They'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes."
Finale similar to 'Field of Dreams'
Baseball just feels right here in the Midwest, and nowhere more so than at the venue named for former Omaha mayor Johnny Rosenblatt. Shoeless Joe Jackson and Co. may not have emerged like Gandalf from the afterlife to play at Rosenblatt like they did in the '89 movie, but Rosenblatt has been the site of dreams – and of night-mares – in its 61 glorious years of hosting the College World Series.
Sure, "Field of Dreams" – the appropriately named 1989 film in which James Earl Jones' character, Terrence Mann, utters the above words – took place in Iowa, but its application to the College World Series, held in Omaha, Neb., is apt. After all, nothing but a zoo and a river separates Rosenblatt Stadium from the Hawkeye State.
The three-game series between UCLA and South Carolina that begins today will be the beginning of the end for the stadium. 2010 is the last year that Rosenblatt will serve as the tournament's host.
"They'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they have to brush them away from their faces."
"The one constant through all the years ... has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time."
It certainly does in Omaha, where the entire city pulses with action when baseball descends upon it. At its epicenter is Rosenblatt, atop a grassy knoll, its blue girders still appearing as strong as ever and giving little evidence that they have held fast for six decades.
The heartland that is the Midwest is often referred to as the crossroads of America, so perhaps it's only natural that there's a sense of anything-can-happen, thingscan-go-any-direction around Rosenblatt.
"This place is an adventure of its own," TCU pitcher Matt Purke said after he led his team to a win over UCLA on Friday. "You never know what's going to happen here."
A combination of draconian heat, tricky winds, crowds of 20,000-plus and the grandeur of the stage make for an unparalleled baseball experience. Not that, the future site of the event – the sickeningly corporate TD Ameritrade Park – won't feature those things, but at Rosenblatt it just feels proper. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the name itself evokes an image of spring. Indeed, for 61 memorable fortnights, the stadium has flourished. It blossoms into something brilliant. It becomes a Rose-in-bloom.