Shocks vs. OU at Chesapeake Arena Dec. 10th 3 PM ESPN2

[martymoose]

MM - question: did you get tickets yesterday or are you waiting for secondary market? Called ticket office yesterday at 10:20 and simply asked if they were selling tickets. Reply was they were all gone already. Called back at 10:30, mentioned I was season ticket holder. This time they checked my status, then told me their allotment was gone and that I would be placed on a waiting list in case of cancellations. Dont understand your your comment on priority points unless the waiting list will be by points? Unless they were out of their allotment within 30 minutes, which is possible, it definately was not first come first served.

Stickboy46's above comment is correct. Yes, I got lucky and got tickets. I don't know for sure when WSU started selling their allotment yesterday, it may well have been before 10:00. If I had to guess I'd say it was whenever they opened. When I was unable to get anything good on Ticketmaster I called WSU just at a shot in the dark for tickets at 10:10 and to my luck they had some. I needed 10 but was told I could only buy 4 and friends would have to call and order their allotments. My buddy Shocks771 called not more than 2 minutes after me and they were sold out. Another buddy called 5 minutes later with much better priority ranking and was told he could be put on a waiting list but it was unlikely there would be anymore tickets. So the 400 tickets that were sold yesterday morning will now be ranked by priority points for those who got them. I'll be checking Stubhub, Craigslist and the OU message board to fill our additional 6 tickets.

[shoxlax]

Marty is right, be patient. If OU or --God forbid us --lose a few before then, tickets will be plentiful in the lower bowl and cheap. If not then there still will be choices, albeit more expensive than face value. It's a stock buy----timing and the market demand is everything. I'm probably not even going to get serious about it until after Atlantis

On a positive note, yesterday I bought 4 tickets right behind our bench for our game @ Loyola.

[_kai_]

A lot of you must of had sour grapes for breakfast. Pull your heads out and take a step back.
1. Ticketmaster doesn't control the tickets. Tickets are controlled by the promoter of the event and/or the arena. Ticketmaster does what they say.
2. This is OU's game, not WSU's. Therefore they get first dibs on all tickets, like we do for games played at IBA.
3. Much like every other arena in the country I'm sure CEA has held back nearly a thousand prime tickets for their season ticket holders to have first dibs on and will release them if not claimed.
4. When OU plays at IBA next year, WSU fans will have the opportunity to sell out the arena before they are released to the general public...guessing OU fans won't have the same meltdown.
5. I'm sure they care what the crowd looks like on TV, but selling tickets is #1 priority and if OU has bought them all, then they're sold and the arena is happy.
6. Placing blame on our ticket office is ridiculous...They got an allotment which they use for players and families then released the remainder this morning to season ticket holders not knowing in advance how many they'd have. The people who bought them will be ranked in order of priority points. Priority points don't say who gets or doesn't get tickets this time...it was first come first serve.
7. There will be tickets on the secondary market and I'm sure they will go cheap, so just be patient.

But what is the rationale for advertising all of the ticket prices to the public, when they only sold one level of tickets to the public?

[Slalomshocker]

I'm with @_Kai on this one. You advertise separate price ranges AND state on sale to general public. Yet not all of the seats are available and within 20min no tickets were available.....and then mysteriously 600 more tickets become available.... Just don't hold a public offering until you know how many freaking tickets you have to sell to the general public! Quite Simple.

And yes I did get tickets through WSU, but like others, I was not able to purchase the desired qty. Going in with the assumption of having multiple seats available to choose from, and then running into the circus that has been getting tickets for this..... quite frustrating.

[martymoose]

But what is the rationale for advertising all of the ticket prices to the public, when they only sold one level of tickets to the public?

Exactly the same reason IBA advertises all of the prices for the WSU game, but several are sold out by the time the public sale opens. Nothing that happened yesterday is new in the world of tickets sales...it just seems WSU fans are still behind the times in understanding how it all works.

[Play Angry]

Exactly the same reason IBA advertises all of the prices for the WSU game, but several are sold out by the time the public sale opens. Nothing that happened yesterday is new in the world of tickets sales...it just seems WSU fans are still behind the times in understanding how it all works.

This reads a little (lot?) condescending.

I think much of the confusion lies with the discrepancy in the numbers. An 18,000+ capacity arena, which had ~8,000 seats allotted to current season ticket holders and did not have a high volume presale, made ~2,000 seats available for sale to the public in a quarter section of the upper bowl. That means there is an additional holdback of roughly ~8,000 seats, or ~40-50% of the entire arena's capacity, even after season tickets have been allocated.

That is not typical. Is it a huge deal? No, of course not - as you correctly note, cheap tickets will be available on the secondary market as game day approaches. Is it so easily explainable, based upon the information at hand, that anyone confused is "behind the times"? I don't think so.

[Cdizzle]

It is possible for something to both be handled incompetently and also to not be that big of a deal. I think that is the case we have here.

The real victims here are probably the folks at the WSU ticket office, who were not responsible for the incompetence AND had to deal with lots of unhappy people making it a big deal. Lose-lose.

[_kai_]

A lot of you must of had sour grapes for breakfast. Pull your heads out and take a step back.
1. Ticketmaster doesn't control the tickets. Tickets are controlled by the promoter of the event and/or the arena. Ticketmaster does what they say.
2. This is OU's game, not WSU's. Therefore they get first dibs on all tickets, like we do for games played at IBA.
3. Much like every other arena in the country I'm sure CEA has held back nearly a thousand prime tickets for their season ticket holders to have first dibs on and will release them if not claimed.
4. When OU plays at IBA next year, WSU fans will have the opportunity to sell out the arena before they are released to the general public...guessing OU fans won't have the same meltdown.
5. I'm sure they care what the crowd looks like on TV, but selling tickets is #1 priority and if OU has bought them all, then they're sold and the arena is happy.
6. Placing blame on our ticket office is ridiculous...They got an allotment which they use for players and families then released the remainder this morning to season ticket holders not knowing in advance how many they'd have. The people who bought them will be ranked in order of priority points. Priority points don't say who gets or doesn't get tickets this time...it was first come first serve.
7. There will be tickets on the secondary market and I'm sure they will go cheap, so just be patient.

Exactly the same reason IBA advertises all of the prices for the WSU game, but several are sold out by the time the public sale opens. Nothing that happened yesterday is new in the world of tickets sales...it just seems WSU fans are still behind the times in understanding how it all works.

This reads a little (lot?) condescending.

I think much of the confusion lies with the discrepancy in the numbers. An 18,000+ capacity arena, which had ~8,000 seats allotted to current season ticket holders and did not have a high volume presale, made ~2,000 seats available for sale to the public in a quarter section of the upper bowl. That means there is an additional holdback of roughly ~8,000 seats, or ~40-50% of the entire arena's capacity, even after season tickets have been allocated.

That is not typical. Is it a huge deal? No, of course not - as you correctly note, cheap tickets will be available on the secondary market as game day approaches. Is it so easily explainable, based upon the information at hand, that anyone confused is "behind the times"? I don't think so.

It's the math of the situation that makes no sense to me. Above is a great example. I don't see how what was released to the public is what was available, unless OU or the promoter is holding back tickets. So, by the math, roughly 16,000 tickets are already accounted for between OU season ticket holders and the promoter's members?

Maybe someone who knows how the world of ticket sales works can explain it to me.

[martymoose]

It's the math of the situation that makes no sense to me. Above is a great example. I don't see how what was released to the public is what was available, unless OU or the promoter is holding back tickets. So, by the math, roughly 16,000 tickets are already accounted for between OU season ticket holders and the promoter's members?

Maybe someone who knows how the world of ticket sales works can explain it to me.

WSU fans bought more tickets in the WSU presale for the OSU game than there are season ticket holders at CKA, correct? ...and yes it appears OU is holding all the tickets and planning to distribute them as they see fit to their season ticket holders.

[martymoose]

This reads a little (lot?) condescending.

Hopefully it sounds a lot condescending... ;)

That's aimed towards the folks who are laying blame with our ticket office and others who can seem to understand that we get first dibs on our tickets (IBA) but seem to think OU shouldn't get first dibs on their tickets (CEA). Or the constant complaining about Ticketmaster. If you don't like the convenience of Ticketmaster drive to the arena and pay in person like the olden days.

[ShockerFever]

This reads a little (a lot?) condescending.

It also reads of a person who lucked into tickets already being in hand.

[SHOCKvalue]

Exactly the same reason IBA advertises all of the prices for the WSU game, but several are sold out by the time the public sale opens. Nothing that happened yesterday is new in the world of tickets sales...it just seems WSU fans are still behind the times in understanding how it all works.

The WSU-IBA game versus OU-CEA game ticket sale analogies don't completely work out in the wash, IMO.

The IBA game sales prior to public access are actual people who made a conscious decision to buy tickets, and plan to be physical butts-in-seats. So the ~13K IBA game tickets that were sold prior to public (and OSU accordingly) access are truly individually sold seats that will be used, by and large. If an OSU fan wanted to buy tickets first thing last Saturday morning, and was shocked at the low availability of remaining tickets, he or she would have to do very little searching for a concrete answer.

Conversely, for the OU game, none of use has any idea where that huge chunk of tickets disappeared to specifically. We can guess and assume, but no one actually knows as of yet.

The thought that all those tickets went automatically towards the OU season ticket package is plausible, but that is far from being a corollary to the WSU IBA game. It's not like those people are actually going to show up and use their ticket; assumedly it is just a cheap gateway to football ticket priority ranking for most of them. Plus, the combined average for OU MBB attendance (season tickets + general public + walk-ups + students) is only a hair more than half of the total capacity for CEA. Where did the other 8K tickets go, outside of the couple thousand offered publicly yesterday morning?

I guess it could be the OKC sport commission members, but the last time OU was in this event they played Texas A&M in front of 3400 people in an 18K seat arena. Is WSU really that much more of a draw? Flattering thought, but terribly unlikely. I doubt we are any more of a draw for locals than TAMU was. Very likely we're less.

If it is a bunch of speculatory ticket re-sellers then they're in for a world of hurt and an economics lesson, what with an 18K seat arena featuring one team that effectively doesn't really have a traditional MBB fanbase to speak of, and another fanbase that has to decide whether ticket reseller prices plus a 350 mile round trip is worth the headache.

The thought that this really isn't all that big of a deal is absolutely correct. That said, not being a big deal doesn't make it any less odd, curious, or worthy of summary dismissal.

[ShockBand]

Can someone who is overly bored fire up a daily updated metric on when the panicky scalper fire sale will begin? Do we see the first Groupon or major dive in prices on Black Friday, will it take into December, or will the fire sale begin sooner?

[AG1219]

How many seats does the lower bowl hold? It is reported that OU fans have this ticket as part of their season ticket package. Similar to our first IBA game. Not held, actual tickets. Also, their students that signed up for season pass (2,000 via a simple google search) get a ticket to this game.

The promoter opens the best of upper deck sections (extra seats after all season ticket holders are accounted for). Then as those sell, opens up a couple more.

Those asking where did the other 5-8k tickets go? They are in the upper deck of the sections that aren't open yet is my guess. The sections that are open now get low on tickets, they will open more sections.

Relax, get a ticket in the upper deck, or off secondary market later, and find a seat when you get there. This game will have the feel of an arch madness Friday crowd with huge blocks of the lower bowl completely empty.

[ShockerPhi]

It's the math of the situation that makes no sense to me. Above is a great example. I don't see how what was released to the public is what was available, unless OU or the promoter is holding back tickets. So, by the math, roughly 16,000 tickets are already accounted for between OU season ticket holders and the promoter's members?

Maybe someone who knows how the world of ticket sales works can explain it to me.

My assumption is the entire lower bowl was accounted for between OU season ticket holders and the promoter's members. As for the upper bowl, I'm pretty sure they only released those 5 sections and only intended on blocking off the rest of the upper bowl. I think they were shocked with how many people wanted those tickets, so they oppened up the last 4 rows in those sections. My guess is soon they might have to open up a few more sections.

Keep in mind, in years past, this only drew like 5000 people. They probably had 0 people in the upper bowl then.