June 4, 2008
By JAMES GROB, Courier sports editor
It’s a half a gallon of gas. It’s a bottle of Mountain Dew and a Snickers bar. It’s about 25 color copies.
But it’s two bucks too many.
The University of Iowa athletic department announced this week that the Hawkeyes will increase ticket prices for men’s basketball games by $2 next season.
I know, it’s just a couple bills. Not all that much dough. On bleary-eyed Sunday mornings, when the offering plate comes around and you suddenly realize you spent most of your cash at the tavern the night before and all you have left in your wallet is a pair of singles, you fold the bills all up so it looks like there might be several of them in there. A measly two-dollar offering makes you look embarrassingly cheap.
But when you add $2 per basketball ticket to what the price was, it seems like a lot more.
Single-game men’s basketball tickets will jump to $27 for weekend games and $22 for weekdays.
Season tickets for the public will cost $364. That’s a $28 increase.
Twenty-seven bucks to see a ball game? Now you’re talking about some serious cash.
You want to treat your family to a Hawkeye basketball game? In order to pay for the gas to Iowa
City and back, four or more tickets, some nachos, a couple T-shirts and maybe dinner afterwards at a place just a little bit better than Applebee’s, you might have to take out a sub-prime loan.
The Iowa basketball team used to belong to the common people of Iowa. We identified with the players, we appreciated the coach, we wore the black and gold. We claimed them as “our team.” And we took a drive to watch them once or twice a year. Unless you invested a chunk of cash in Exxon-
Mobil stock a few years back, that just isn’t the case anymore.
A price increase would make sense if the Hawkeyes had been a Final Four team last season. Or even if they would have made the Sweet Sixteen. Or maybe even if they’d have made any kind of postseason tournament at all. Actually, if the Hawkeyes would have had a winning record or if the hard-working citizens of Iowa had any idea of who any of the players on the Iowa basketball team were, a price increase could possibly have been justified.
As it is, Iowa finished 13-19 last season, setting a school record for losses. The Hawkeyes also drew the lowest-ever per-game attendance at Carver-Hawkeye Arena last season. And since most Iowans weren’t able to watch the Hawkeyes on television due to the combined idiocracy of both the Big

Ten Network and the major cable companies, no one in Iowa learns any of the players’ names until they either transfer or get arrested for something.
Couple this with the fact that most people are hurting financially from what has been called an
“economic slowdown” — even though most of the good people of Iowa never saw any benefits from the “economic speed-up” that allegedly happened before the so-called slowdown — and this seems like an unwise time for a state university to increase ticket prices for athletic events.
Iowa athletic director Gary Barta says the $2 increase is minimal when compared to inflation. He says the program’s costs have grown significantly.
So have the program’s failures.
Next week, Barta will meet with the state’s Board of Regents as the school seeks to move forward with a $47 million renovation of Carver-Hawkeye Arena, the basketball team’s home. It’s the first step in some grand plan for the facelift of the arena.
So you lighten the wallets of the fans as you belly up to the public trough.
Nice.
As my parents used to ask me, “Do you think we’re made of money?”
The Hawkeyes are not going to fill any seats in Carver-Hawkeye Arena — renovations or not — by increasing ticket prices. If anything, the ticket price should be lowered until the basketball team’s record starts improving.
Actually, maybe the cost of a ticket should be directly related to the team’s success. Let’s set the price based on the number of wins from the season before — one dollar per win. Iowa won 13 games last season, so the price for a ticket to a home game should be set at $13. If the team wins 20 games, charge $20. If Iowa has an unbelievably huge season and wins 35 games, go ahead and charge
$35.
If the Hawkeyes are that good, the fans will redeem all their beer cans and search their couch cushions until they come up with enough money to watch them in person.
Until they’re that good, at $27 per ticket, Iowa fans will continue listening to the Hawkeyes on the radio as they munch on their value meals.
And the empty seats in Carver-Hawkeye Arena will continue to look sad and lonely.