Reseating

I've been working on an Illini State of the Union address today but I've spent 75% of my time researching (and tweeting about) the reseating process that's going on right now. I finally just gave up on the State of the Union (I'll publish that tomorrow or over the weekend) and I'll write out all of my thoughts on the reseating right now. And yes, this one is unlocked and available for everyone to read.

First off, it was announced last May that there would be a reseating process for both Memorial Stadium and State Farm Center in 2025. The DIA was switching to a fairly common model in modern college athletics: reseat every five years or so and offer the best seats to the highest donors at the time. The old model of "my grandparents have had these seats since 1966" has faded away in the NIL/Revenue Sharing era.

And let me pause right there and acknowledge that this era makes many of you want to jump off the train. I totally get it. It is an absolute shock to the system. Dain Dainja saves us from disaster in a first-round NCAA Tournament game and a few weeks later he's a Memphis Tiger. I understand every "this is where I get off" decision. I'm still on the train because, well, I quit my job to do this and I don't ever want to go back, but I just want to acknowledge that I understand those decisions.

Because I'm still on the train, my brain immediately flips to "OK, how do we win as many games as possible in the next 20 years?" I can get from "but their grandparents had those seats the 1960's" to "gouge the donors if it means we can make the College Football Playoff" in maybe three steps. In 2025, more than any other single year in college sports history, money = championships. (Until it's usurped by 2026. And then 2027.)

As you might know, we've always lagged way behind when it comes to money. Football is king when it comes to athletic department finances, and with 30 years of bad football and terrible attendance, we've been way, way behind. In Bret Bielema's first season in Champaign (2021), our average attendance was 35,347, good for 59th in all of college football and immediately behind East Carolina. Our cash cow produces no milk.

Donations have always lagged as well. Searching the Knight Commission database, here's a sampling of the "athletic department donations" column from several Big Ten schools for the latest year on record (2023):

Nebraska - $61.16 million
Ohio State - $58.76 million
Wisconsin - $51.19 million
Michigan State - $46.44 million
Iowa - $45.86 million
Illinois - $35.42 million

You can see why Josh Whitman might be interested in boosting our numbers. Perhaps a better way to put that: if Josh Whitman wasn't focused on developing winning programs and then asking fans to do their part with attendance and donations, he'd be doing us a disservice. If we want to say "hey, Wisconsin football fans, we're currently passing you", we can't be 38,000 fans-per-game behind them in football attendance (like we were in 2021) or $16 million behind them in donations (like we were in 2023).

Thankfully, we no longer have those 2021 football attendance numbers. In 2024, we averaged 54,750 fans per game with two sellouts. That's "only" 21,307 fans-per-game behind Wisconsin in 2024. We don't have the 2024 financial data yet, but in 2023, for all sports, Wisconsin brought in $33.8 million from ticket sales and Illinois brought in $19.8 million. That's still a big gap but... we're getting closer.

The tickets sales after a 10-3 football season (especially with Wisconsin going 5-7) should close that gap even further. Donations are still lagging well behind those in Madison, but one way to boost that is to, you guessed it, reseat the football stadium and the basketball arena. Fans will increase their donation levels to get access to better seats and the tide will rise.

But again, let me pause and talk about the dedicated fan. There are fans – so many fans – who have supported this football team through thick and thin (mostly thin) the last 30 years. While you gave up on the football team every October and just focused on basketball, they supported this team with their noise (and their money) every home Saturday. When they got up the Saturday after Thanksgiving and loaded up the family to take them to a meaningless game at home against Northwestern in Champaign, they did it out of pure love. The thing they had to offer this football program was their ticket money and their noise.

A reseating is so unfair to those people. I may fully understand the financial need for it, but it's still unfair. It's 30 years of hard work for the company only to watch the outside hire get the corner office. Dedication doesn't matter. Time invested doesn't matter. Only the bottom line matters.

Could "time invested" matter? Could priority be given to longtime season ticket holders first and then high-end donors second? Maybe. I know it would be difficult. Could you really sit one person who has donated $10,000 for access to that section next to someone who has "donated" 18 years of having season tickets but fewer dollars? How would you quantify that investment made by the long-term season ticket holders? Total years of "service" matches up with a certain dollar amount? When ticket prices go up and someone can't afford that section anymore, how far do they tumble? All the way to the bottom of the list behind the first-year season ticket holders? They have to wait for the next reseat?

It's not easy. And I guess it doesn't matter. This is what was chosen and this is how the process will go. I should just move on to the issue that came up today.

The reseating process began on Tuesday with the highest donors getting the first calls. I'm guessing Shad Khan was first. (That's mostly a joke since I'm sure Shad has a suite or club seats.) But the reseating starts with your priority points. You get a certain amount of points for your "Priority Seating Contribution" and a certain number of points for your "Illini Excellence Contribution" and then those points determine the order of the reseating.

The concern: I heard from a few people last night and this morning that tickets were already showing up on resale sites. They can see that 12 seats in one row in one section were changed from green to red yesterday (each donor gets to see what seats are available) and then those red seats showed up on StubHub today. Does that mean there are ticket brokers who got to pick seats yesterday and they're already selling them for the Ohio State game today? I researched it, I talked to the football SID, and here's my answer:

Probably not.

The math just doesn't work out. There's ticket demand in Champaign now, but I don't think there's THAT much ticket demand. I purchase four tickets that I give away every game (I can get in for free with my press pass) and let's just say that I've often struggled to give them away. I refuse to sell them on the secondary market (a Michigan fan buying one of my four seats last October would have ended my life) and so I feel like I have a pretty good handle on the "want some free tickets?" market. Know the right people and you can still go to a few games a year for free.

So would a ticket broker really donate $20,000 (a donation they'd have to re-up each year) in order to purchase 20 season tickets that they can then sell on the secondary market? 20 is the max that one donor can purchase when their re-seating appointment arrives. Would they really feel like they could recoup that upfront cost? No way.

I inquired about where we are in the reseating process and was told that yesterday was the transition from Loyalty Circle Silver (minimum $20,000 yearly donation) to Loyalty Circle Bronze (minimum $12,000 yearly donation) and then today was mostly Loyalty Circle Bronze members. So at a minimum, whoever is putting those 12 seats on Stubhub this morning for the Ohio State game donated at least $12,000 for that appointment time. Likely $20,000.

Doing the quick math, that person would need to make $85 over face value for every ticket every game to break even. No way. I mean, more power to them if they think tickets in the front row of the balcony will sell for $148 each for the Northwestern game two days after Thanksgiving, but no way. Ticket brokers aren't that dumb.

Which means something else is at play here. Best I can figure (as I said, I spent most of the day on this), it's one of these:

1. The tickets for sale on StubHub aren't real.

If you've been on StubHub or SeatGeek this winter, you might have noticed that there were already Illinois football tickets for sale. Which made no sense since the reseating process hadn't even started. The only Illini fans who had tickets to sell would be those with premium seating (club seats or suites which have separate contracts and are not part of the reseating). Everyone else has had to wait for this process to see what seats they would get. Like, everyone else in the entire stadium.

Talking to some people who would know, this is a process those sites allow. Someone might be in the process of receiving tickets and the sites allow them to sell that soon-to-be-acquired ticket. You don't have to have the ticket in hand to sell it. The burden is whether they can eventually provide that ticket for that fan for that event.

Three weeks ago, if those brokers were willing to sell seats they don't have for the Ohio State game in October, hedging on some kind of "I'll acquire those seats or similar seats at some point between now and then", maybe those same brokers are monitoring the reseating map, seeing what seats are being purchased, and updating their "I don't have these tickets yet but I will" listings today with seats that have been selected.

Complicated, I know, but I'm just presenting scenarios here.

2. Loyalty Circle donors are maxing out their purchases in hopes of having seats to sell on the secondary market.

This is that "the call is coming from inside the house" scenario I fear. If the front row of section 228 went from green to red on the seat selection map yesterday and then this listing appeared on StubHub this morning (thanks to Jake for sending this to me)...

Then someone purchased 12 tickets yesterday that they don't intend to use. I doubt it was a broker paying $20,000 for the right to make a selection yesterday so... maybe a donor who bought 8 tickets for himself/herself and then, since they can order up to 20, they purchased 12 tickets in the front row of the west balcony that they're going to sell every game? If so.....

It's October 11th. Illinois and Ohio State are playing a ranked-vs-ranked matchup in Champaign. There's real excitement in Memorial Stadium that IlliBuck might return to Champaign for the first time since 2007. As David Olano lines up for the opening kickoff, the CBS camera on the opposite sideline pans up to show... the 12 Ohio State fans in the front row of 228.

If this is the case, it's a shame. A damn shame. 12 seats, occupied for years by those fans who gave up their fall Saturdays to drive to Champaign and support the boys even during 2-10 seasons, would be occupied by Ohio State fans placed there by Illini donors. Talk about a one-two punch. I get that we need to reseat and raise money but... damn.

I'd love to think that these donors are doing what I've been doing - buying extra seats to give away so that we can get more butts in seats. If that's the case, I understand the donors who are maxing out their 20 even though they might not use them all. But for them to show up on Stubhub the next day? Gross.

3. These seats showing up on Stubhub are part of one of those complicated "resale partner" deals.

I have a friend who works in the ticket office for a MLB club. He's told me before about how tickets are... fluid these days. They'll be selling a seat, and their resale partner is selling the same seat, and then they'll want to use it as a comp ticket so they pull it from resale site and use it themselves. They sell most of their tickets themselves, obviously, but their "resale partner" has access to a certain part of their inventory.

Many have a "season ticket holder isn't using their tickets and they can send those tickets back to the club to be sold on the resale market" deal as well. Some of them even have "I'm not using my two on Wednesday but I'd like four together on Thursday" deals and so part of their season ticket package allows them to dump the two and gain four together for the next game. The resale partners and the team sharing inventories makes these transactions much smoother.

(I probably got a lot of that wrong. But that's the general picture. Inventories are fluid and ticket sites list more tickets than are available because of it.)

So perhaps these 12 seats in the front row of 228 are just a function of that algorithm? Maybe the odds that a few of those 12 seats become available to the reseller are so great that the algorithm says "go ahead and put up '1-12 tickets for sale for Ohio State' and let's see what happens."

My point with this one is that I know the Illini ticket office has had a partnership with StubHub in the past. So perhaps the appearance of those tickets during reseating week is just an algorithm saying "that's a lot of seats held by one person so there's a 42.4% chance two or more eventually end up being sold here" and presto a listing is generated.

My point with all of this: we don't really know. If it's a donor who bought 20 yesterday and immediately put them on StubHub hours later, that absolutely sucks. Not only did they block out 12 fans waiting to get good seats, they're likely putting visiting fans in the front row of the balcony. If it's a broker or an algorithm putting up a listing... it still sucks for the true fans getting shoved to the side.

There's no great solution here. I wish there was a way to prevent resale (maybe there is?), but I fully understand the free market here and the need to raise funds. I wish there was a way to reward decades of loyalty instead of only reseating by donor level, but I understand that when digging in on that question I might get an "that's fine, but are you OK with $10 million less for retaining our coaches?" answer. I trust this AD, and he's signed off on this, so I have to trust that this is what's best for the future of Illini athletics in the Big Ten.

I just got a text from a friend about this and it's the perfect way to close. Who would have thought that, in 2025, we'd be having this discussion about Illini football tickets? In 2021 we had our lowest attendance since World War II. Not even four years later, we're fighting over spots in the stands. Given the two scenarios, I prefer this ugliness to 2021's "I can basically pick any seat I want."

And his text gave me the perfect final line as well.

I guess it's no longer one of seventeen.