Another Kent State football season is in the books, and the ceaseless fight for the Flashes to stay in the NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision persists.

For many mid-major universities stuck in the FBS like Kent State, the effort to maintain the NCAA Division I membership requirement for football attendance is real.

“I’d say it’s not only a MAC issue, but after you get out of the top power five conferences, I think there’s a struggle for every team,” said Dennis Watson, the Kent State athletic department’s director of ticket sales and operations. “I know other schools in the MAC definitely struggle to hit it when they have to hit their goal.”

The NCAA Division I membership requirement (20.9.7.3) mandates that “once every two years on a rolling basis, the institution shall average at least 15,000 in actual attendance or paid attendance for all football home games. In meeting the football attendance requirements of the football bowl subdivision, an institution must undertake an annual certified audit verifying its football attendance.”

In order to meet the NCAA-mandated minimum requirement of averaging 15,000 attendance for home football games, the Kent State football team has sought outside financial help.

A few years ago, Kent State used more than $113,000 of its own money to reach a paid attendance of just over 90,000. Now in recent years, Kent State’s athletic department has used department money, provided by corporate partners and sponsors, to buy its own tickets to meet this NCAA attendance requirement.

Outside-in finances

How can a school like Kent State keep up?

In 2012 Kent State averaged 17,412 paid attendance. Then, in 2013, that number fell to 7,073 paid attendance.

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Why such a significant drop? Chances are that in 2012, more corporate tickets were being bought to meet the mandate that year.

A lot MAC schools, as well as schools in the Sentinel Conference, have a difficult time meeting the NCAA’s 15,000 average attendance requirement, which is why these schools will often sell what are called “corporate tickets,” said Devin Crosby, Kent State deputy athletic director.

“We try to sell as many corporate tickets as we can, so we’ll sell tickets at the beginning of the year, and the corporations can actually distribute the tickets, but we count them as a sale, and we sell those tickets as inexpensively as we possibly can,” Crosby said.

Kent State Athletic Director Joel Nielsen said corporate ticket sale distribution helps the department boost its attendance and ticket sales numbers that go toward paid attendance, even if the sale of these tickets doesn’t even result in greater actual attendance.

“What we’ve done is work with our corporate partners, work with our outside entities that provide us outside vendor money, meaning our relationship with our marketing people,” said.

International Management Group, or simply IMG, maintains a contract and partnership with Kent State, providing the university with guaranteed funding for marketing rights. Oftentimes Kent State applies the money given to it by IMG to distribute tickets.

“We’ve applied other outside vendor money payments that they send to us, and we just purchase tickets with those,” Nielsen said. “I’m quite confident that we’ll make the number this year because we’ve had a strategic plan along the way using that outside vendor money to purchase additional tickets.”

Some of Kent State’s other corporate partners include AMETEK, Tree City Coffee and Water Street Tavern – organizations that are all vendors from which the department buys products.

“It’s a wide range (of customers),” Crosby said. “(I’ve seen) anything from groups buying 50 tickets, to some groups buying much much more than 50,” Crosby said.

IMG, for example, makes a cash payment to Kent State. That money can be used toward anything, but every other year, Nielsen said he takes the money and applies it toward buying tickets “to protect (the) Division I membership and to protect (Kent State against) that bylaw.”

“We’re a little more strategic about it because now when we buy (tickets) throughout the year, we can just go ahead and disperse those in the community so that if it’s charitable organizations that want to come to us and bring people, we have those tickets available to them,” Nielsen said.

Although counting tickets bought by the athletic department as “attendance” might seem unethical or inaccurate/misleading, Nielsen said the NCAA doesn’t seem to care who buys the tickets or where the money comes from.

As long as Kent State can turn in an audit every other year that reads that it averaged 15,000 attendance, that’s all that matters.

“In the past, (the NCAA) hasn’t been overly concerned about where that money comes from,” Nielsen said. “They just want to see in the audit that there was a ticket purchase for x amount of tickets at the one-third cost of the highest and that you add your student tickets in there and some other ticket categories in there to make that number.

“We use a variety of monies that come in from the outside…that we keep within the department that then go toward buying tickets,” Nielsen said. “It’s really just a redistribution of where that money’s going within the department because at the end of the year, we’re just trying to make our budget number that we predicted as an entire department.

“That money stays in house.”

According to the NCAA, its rules don’t specifically restrict the number of tickets a school can buy, but should this smaller, mid-major universities like Kent State, though, have to buy their own football tickets just to meet the NCAA’s requirement to stay in the FBS? Nielsen’s candid response was simple.

“I’m just fulfilling the requirement of the bylaw,” Nielsen said. “There are ways to meet the bylaw, and I’m meeting the bylaw.”

The Process

From 2012 onward, the Kent State athletic department has used its total paid attendance to fulfill the mandate. Per the NCAA bylaw for attendance requirements, paid attendance includes regular paid tickets (walkup tickets, pre-sale tickets, group tickets and comp tickets), student tickets kept track of via swiping Flashcards at the entrance gates and corporate tickets (might include pre-sale tickets).

At the end of a football season, Eric Fronczek, Kent State ticket office manager, compiles all of the paid attendance numbers from the football season and fills out a ticket sales audit report.

“Each game I have a ticket sales audit report from our ticketing system that shows everything that was sold – all tickets, all paid tickets, all comp tickets – it breaks down season tickets, individual tickets, student tickets, so it’s a good report of every ticket that was distributed out there for that game, and then at the end of the season, basically the internal auditors contact me and send me a list of everything they want, which includes that game-by-game ticket sales audit, daily reconciliation report for each day from the ticket office so they can go back and match up what was sold on the audits what is sold each day on the audits and what we actually took in money-wise each day,” Fronczek said. “So they look at every single day from July 1 until now. They just verify that the money that we took in that goes into banner matches what our reports say.”

By the university’s own standard, the Kent State athletic department uses the university’s own internal auditor to audit all of the department’s paid tickets during the current football season. During this step in the process, Fronczek said the athletic department must fill out NCAA forms due to the NCAA by February 15. The forms, one for each home game, show all the department’s countable tickets that go toward attendance as set by the NCAA’s policy. The tickets must be paid in order to count toward attendance and, according to the mandate, each individual ticket can’t be sold for any less than one-third of the highest ticket price for that particular game.

“Student tickets count as paid tickets because the NCAA allows schools to count them if their students pay an activity fee, so that’s why our student tickets are free because there’s a fee included in their tuition,” Fronczek said.

According to an investigation conducted by Kent State University journalists a few years ago, 37 percent of student fees – or $271 out of $731 – are paid to athletics. The majority of these fees go toward buying football tickets, Nielsen and Crosby said.

2014 Football Season

As the 2014 attendance numbers will not be finalized until February 2014, one cannot help but wonder what those numbers will manifest this year.

Last year Dix Stadium only averaged 7,073 attendance, according to the Fall 2013 Football Ticket Attendance and Revenue Audit sent to the NCAA, so Kent State will have to hit the mark this year in order to comply with the mandate.

Meeting the requirement this year won’t be easy though, as attendance was down again this season due to a number of factors against the Flashes.

“There were a couple factors, I think three games were rain, and we had two games in November, midweek…that’s not good for anyone, and we weren’t as competitive this year (in regard to wins-losses as we would have hoped,” Nielsen said.

The Akron game crowd was especially scarce, which only recorded a 5,118 attendance number on Black Friday.

“I think we maybe have about 7,000 tickets sold for this game because many of them were sold in the summer and in season tickets as well,” Crosby said of the Akron game. “You won’t see 7,000 people here at this game, so on attendance we go off of tickets distributed.”

Nielsen said the department does its best to predict ticket sale patterns, but some seasons prove more difficult to forecast than others.

“We try to do some forecasting (for each game’s attendance) before the year starts…and then we just fill in with some of the corporate ticket buys throughout those (home) games,” Nielsen said. First we forecast, and then we fill in based on how attendance is. “We’re getting pretty close to predicting (attendance patterns for games), but weather is the one big factor in there that really just blows us out of the water.

“There’s a game where we’ll by 3 or 5,000 tickets,” Nielsen said. “You have to come back and buy more tickets to cover your number, and with (the Akron game) being the last game of the year, that’s the last game you have to fill in to make your 15,000 average.”

Penalty for not complying

If a school fails to comply with the NCAA Division I membership requirement for attendance, the program will be issued a letter of noncompliance, which puts the school on notice that it must meet the mandate the following year.

Not much is known about what happens to school if they continually fail to comply with the mandate, as most schools in the FBS are able to meet it over a rolling two year period, Nielsen said.

The only time Kent State has ever been close to losing its FBS status was when Nielsen arrived as athletic director back in 2010.

During the 2009 season, one year before Nielsen took then-athletic director Laing Kennedy’s place, Dix Stadium only averaged 5,657 in paid attendance, almost $10,000 below the required average.

“My first year here (2010), we had not met the bylaw in two or three years,” Nielsen said. “At that point, I think we bought some tickets in arrears to make up for the bylaw. In my years of working in this business, that’s probably about as close as I’ve heard that anyone’s gotten to the point of the NCAA considering some kind of penalty or some kind of ramification based on not meeting the number.”

Even Crosby, who has only been at Kent State a little more than a year now, said he’s also never seen a school face a strict penalty for missing the attendance mark set by the NCAA.

“Since the NCAA instituted this policy about 15,000 fans average in 2002, there hasn’t been a school yet that, even if they went below, faced a consequence of any sort, but nonetheless it’s a rule that a lot of us feel we need to make sure we’re maintaining that average of 15,000 fans, so one of the things that we do and we spend our time on is selling as many corporate tickets as possible.”

Contact Richie at [email protected].

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