No TV blackouts, Weaver says
Jaguars owner happily announces brisk ticket sales for 2006.
By VITO STELLINO, The Times-Union
Noting "the fans are excited about this football team," Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver announced Tuesday the team has sold all of its 54,000 non-premium seats and will lift the television blackout for every game this season.
The Jaguars have also sold all group tickets (about 5,000) for four games - Dallas, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and the New York Giants - and have 1,500 to 2,500 left for the other four regular-season games and the two preseason games.
The only other tickets the Jaguars have left to sell are about 900 premium seats (out of 11,000) and Weaver said the Jaguars hope to have a sold-out stadium for every home game. Premium seats don't have to be sold to lift a blackout, but Weaver hopes to sell all of them.
"We look forward to having a loud stadium and a great home-field advantage," he said.
Non-premium group tickets that aren't sold will be offered to the season-ticket holders. Any remaining after that will be put on sale to the general public.
"We're building a tradition and a following," Weaver said. "This is really a great NFL market, and I think there's an energy in the community about this team that we probably haven't seen since 1999 when we made the 14-2 run."
Weaver said the Jaguars will start a waiting list for fans who want to pay a refundable $50 fee to put their names on it. But the owner cautioned that the Jaguars can't automatically expect to keep selling out in the future.
"This is not a one-time deal," he said. "We've had 800 club seat fans tell us they're not going to renew for next year for whatever reason. Maybe they're moving out of the community or economic conditions or whatever. This is an ongoing process we have to go through every season."
Weaver said the team won't know until next year how many non-premium season-ticket holders will decline to renew their tickets for the 2007 season. Though the team went 12-4 in 2005, several thousand seat holders didn't renew this year. But the Jaguars managed to sell them.
As demand grows for tickets, Weaver also wants to raise ticket prices, which are now among the lowest in the league.
Weaver said that's one of the reasons the Jaguars have no plans to uncover the almost 10,000 seats they covered up in 2005 to shrink the capacity of Alltel stadium to 67,164.
"We're not going to uncover those seats for a long time," he said.
"One of the reasons we covered them is that we have too big a stadium for our market size. It doesn't make any logical sense to [uncover them] to satisfy the demand for a game or two and still have blackouts for several other games. It doesn't plan for the economic strategy of being able to have a waiting list and get our season-ticket price closer to the NFL average."
In 2004, the last year the seats were uncovered, the Jaguars sold 76,877 tickets for a game against Pittsburgh and they could easily match that number for a Monday night game against the Steelers on Sept. 18. But the downside would mean blacking out other games.
Weaver said the team's 12-4 record, an attractive home schedule that includes the last two Super Bowl winners, Pittsburgh and New England, as well as the Giants (featuring the return of former Jaguars coach Tom Coughlin), Dallas Cowboys and Indianapolis Colts all contributed to achieving the sellouts.
Asked if the Jaguars have turned an economic corner, Weaver said: "I think the market has grown with the economy. I just read recently that we've got only 2.6 or 2.8 [percent] unemployment in our area, which is much lower than the national average of 4.6. Things are good in Jacksonville. It's the best of times."
Weaver painted a bright economic picture for the Jaguars, a small-market team dealing with the new collective bargaining agreement, which increases their player costs by $19 million this season.
He said that if the Jaguars sell out all premium seats, they'll likely be in the black and won't even reach the threshold that would qualify them for revenue sharing.
Teams that spend 65 percent of their revenue on players are supposed to become part of the league's revenue sharing pool, although the exact formula has yet to be hammered out by the owners.
The Jaguars play their first preseason home game on Saturday, Aug. 19 against Carolina. They will open the regular season against Dallas on Sunday. Sept. 10.
