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Cavernous Atlanta venue combined with sputtering economy will mean a sea of empty seats at ACC Tournament DOME ECONOMICS
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Published: March 12, 2009
ATLANTA -- In sunnier days, the ACC packed up its crown-jewel basketball tournament and hit the road, searching for more.
More jack? More fame? More market share? More toeholds in the conference's spreading footprint?
Any answer worked because any answer meant more something, which invariably led to more money and more athletic power and more self-esteem. As they used to say in the real-estate business, almost everything goes up and almost nothing goes down. They don't say that now, about housing prices or even the ACC Tournament, the gold standard of conference playoffs.
Amid a banking crisis and pounding recession, the ACC returns to Atlanta's Georgia Dome for the 56th tournament, today through Sunday. An obvious and understandable shortage of discretionary spending money has intersected another trend: The concept that conference tournaments themselves are discretionary events bridging a gap between the regular season and selections for the NCAA Tournament.
The result: Thousands of unsold seats. After the fundraising departments of the 12 ACC schools reported persistently soft sales, the ACC and Commissioner John Swofford decided to put the rejected upper-deck seats on the open market.
"The combination this year of being in a dome in a very difficult economy is not the way you would draw it up," Swofford said. "We'll still be over the capacity of any other building we use."
In late February, the league revealed the first official public ticket sale since 1966, which was the final year that the tournament used its original home, N.C. State's Reynolds Coliseum. That first-public-sale label is a technicality, actually, because sputtering sales for the 2007 tournament in basketball-wary Tampa left booster clubs and scalpers holding stacks of tickets on opening day. The schools sold returned contributor seats at their individual ticket windows in the downtown Tampa arena, although the ACC didn't publicize the unusual development.
Seats still available
This year, eligible donor after eligible donor passed on the chance to buy tournament tickets. The ACC had already decided to shrink the seating chart to about 32,000 at the Georgia Dome, which lists attendance records of 75,406 for an Atlanta Falcons football playoff game and 62,046 for a 1998 NBA game between Atlanta and Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls.
Basketball promoters put the court at one end of the dome, bring in temporary bleachers and try to make distant seats palatable. That's why the Final Four topped out at 53,406 during Maryland's run to the title in 2002 and at 40,083 during the 2001 ACC Tournament.
With projected 2009 sales stuck around 25,000, the ACC offered upper-deck seats for the 11-game tournament. The price: $363 plus $36.30 in ticket-service fees for a total of $399.30 each. There was an initial flurry, and then public sales tapered off. Needless to say, seats are still quite available. Prudent buyers will probably wait until a specific afternoon or night session and look for something closer to the court than Section 332.
The empty seats might seem unfathomable in Greensboro or Charlotte under any economic conditions, but Greensboro and Charlotte are neutral urban sites in a large state obsessed with college basketball.
The ACC ventured away from the hotbeds occasionally in the 1970s and 1980s, visiting Atlanta and Washington three times each. The league wanted to invigorate perimeter markets and, more pointedly, to relieve the internal political tension flowing from the notion that North Carolina locations amounted to competitive favoritism for Big Four schools.
Venturing out
After spending the 1990s in Charlotte and Greensboro, the ACC used Atlanta's Georgia Dome as the 2001 staging ground for setting attendance records at any conference tournament: 40,083 for a single session, 36,505 for an average session and 182,525 for the entire tournament.
The league traveled to Washington in 2005 and Tampa two years later, forays that Swofford considered integral to the marketing strategies of an expanded league trying to solidify positions in Florida and the northeast corridor. The ACC signed Atlanta contracts for this year and 2012 before the housing bubble burst and stock markets tanked.
"The bottom started to fall out of the economy in mid to late fall," Swofford said. "I don't think anyone in any walk of life anticipated what we're seeing right now.
"While sports are not as affected as other parts of the economy, we're certainly not recession-proof, and we're finding it out."
Long before basketball fans started discussing mortgage-based derivatives and other money bombs, ACC leaders realized the limits of their tournament road shows. Starting next year, the league will stage five of its next six tournaments in Greensboro.
"Generally speaking," Swofford said, "people around the league look at Greensboro as the home base. Our philosophy over the years has been to take the tournament away from the home base and touch some other points in our geographic footprint.
"I think moving it around has served its purpose and has been good for the league from the global perspective, and it has enhanced the feeling that the tournament home is in North Carolina and, specifically, Greensboro."
The feeling could intensify this week. A dome half empty by design is a strangely disconnected place. A dome two-thirds empty is downright weird and lonely.
■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com
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