Inside Athletics: Sans Russell

OleMissSports.com's Inside Athletics is a biweekly blog by the Ole Miss athletics department's senior administrators and key personnel to offer fans added insight into the overall operation of the department.

Spring is my favorite time of the year. We are finally not freezing to death at the baseball games. In my last blog, I talked about generalities of the ticket office's functions and hours. I want to get more specific with you this time and talk about two things that we get a lot of questions about - attendance figures and football away game allocations.

Attendance figures at home events where tickets are sold are arrived at in a consistent manner each time. We calculate these by first taking the number of season tickets that have been issued for each sport in question. Then we add to that all tickets sold on an individual basis leading up to the event. We then add to that all working gameday personnel, press and team participants to get our attendance figure for the day. In the case of baseball, we also estimate the number of students and the crowd outside the third baseline fencing to get our figure. Obviously, the figure we use for attendance in some cases is far above the actual number of person's at the game. Now you know why. This is very important when we are compared with other school's attendance figures for national rankings. The majority of schools with Division I sports programs calculate their figures in the same manner.

The second hot topic that I am always asked about is away football game ticket allocations. First of all, you have to realize that the goal of the other team is generally to give us the worst tickets that they can while splitting them up so that we have no large groups of fans in any one location. I look at the sections of seats that we receive from each school and determine what the priority seats are. After determining this, I run lists of UMAA Foundation donors by club level and within that list by number of points they have. The persons in the higher giving levels are allocated first, then the next level and so on down the rankings until no one is left but ticket purchasers who are not UMAA Foundation members. It is a numbers game, so when I run out of lower level seats, I have to go to the upper levels and use those. I apologize to those of you who end up there, but unfortunately, that is what we end up with from many of the schools. We generally call people who say they do not want upper deck seating and 95 percent of those people end up taking it anyway. They just want to see the Rebels play. I hope that answers a few of the questions you might have.

Sans Russell

Assistant Athletics Director For Ticket Operations

Past Articles

	04/11/2008	Inside Athletics: George Smith
	03/24/2008	Inside Athletics: J. Stern
	03/10/2008	Inside Athletics: Langston Rogers
	02/24/2008	Inside Athletics: Joey Brent
	02/01/2008	Inside Athletics: Shannon Singletary
	01/17/2008	Inside Athletics: Derek Horne
	12/20/2007	Inside Athletics: Lynnette Johnson
	12/05/2007	Inside Athletics: Karen Schiferl
	11/24/2007	Inside Athletics: Blake Barnes
	11/06/2007	Inside Athletics: David Wells
	10/17/2007	Inside Athletics: John Hartwell
	10/05/2007	Inside Athletics: Sans Russell
	09/24/2007	Inside Athletics: Walker Jones
	09/05/2007	Inside Athletics: George Smith
	09/05/2007	OleMissSports.com Launches Athletics Blog

The University of Mississippi Athletics

Related Videos