Friday, January 26, 2018

By One Metric, Bucs Most Popular Team in Tampa Bay; Pinellas Supporting Rays Better Than Hillsborough

Since the Rays won't release numbers on where their ticket holders are coming from (except when its convenient for them), I took a look at another metric: where fans were buying specialty license plates.

And while the Bucs and Bolts enjoy considerably more popularity in Hillsborough County than anywhere else in the state, there are more Tampa Bay Rays specialty tags in Pinellas than Hillsborough, despite the coastal county's smaller population (about 30% smaller).

Now this may not come as a surprise to many, but the whole "Pinellas hasn't supported that team" argument really is moot - if Pinellas isn't "properly" supporting the Rays, neither is Hillsborough.

Other fun Florida license plate facts (see the full stats on the WTSP.com story):

Most popular pro teams in Florida:
MIAMI HEAT
37361
TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS
31503
MIAMI DOLPHINS
16854
JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS
8918
TAMPA BAY LIGHTNING
7279
TAMPA BAY RAYS
5007
NASCAR
3422
ORLANDO MAGIC
3111
MIAMI MARLINS
2906
FLORIDA PANTHERS
2061
 
Most popular colleges in Florida:
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
97209
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
73265
UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
25664
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA
18220
FLORIDA A & M UNIVERSITY
16190
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA
14907
FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
2424
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH FLORIDA
1736
FLORIDA GULF COAST UNIVERSITY
1666
ROLLINS COLLEGE
1579
 
Where Tampa Bay Rays plates are most popular:
PINELLAS
1527
HILLSBOROUGH
1387
PASCO
548
MANATEE
289
POLK
183
SARASOTA
181
HERNANDO
104
 
Where Tampa Bay Buccaneers plates are most popular:
HILLSBOROUGH
9887
PINELLAS
5386
PASCO
2738
POLK
1216
MANATEE
1179
MIAMI-DADE
1125
ORANGE
1081
SARASOTA
927
HERNANDO
643
 
Where Tampa Bay Lightning plates are most popular:
HILLSBOROUGH
2606
PINELLAS
1569
PASCO
928
MANATEE
326
POLK
289
SARASOTA
258
HERNANDO
229






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Sunday, January 14, 2018

FSU Sold Fewer Bowl Tickets Than USF

TAMPA BAY, Florida – A post-bowl report by Florida State University reveals the Seminoles’ disappointing football season resulted in the school having to “buy out” the overwhelming majority of tickets it was tasked with selling ahead of its Independence Bowl appearance.
According to the FSU report, the school sold just 1,132 of the 6,000-plus tickets it was required to sell to the Dec. 27 game in Memphis – fewer than the disappointing ticket totals the University of South Florida sold to the Birmingham Bowl, held four days earlier. 

The Seminoles won the Independence Bowl, 42-13, over Southern Miss, to cap off a 7-6 year, FSU’s 41st consecutive winning season.

FSU’s total allotment for the game was 6,064 tickets, so the school gave 2,126 tickets away to local charities and members of the armed forces; 2,438 tickets went unused; and the remaining 400 or so were used by the university.
Schools like FSU typically receive millions from their conferences for simply appearing in a bowl game, and the conference sometimes helps pay for unsold tickets.  But poor showings at a bowl box office, where ticket guarantees can sometimes climb north of 10,000 tickets, can still eat away at hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue a school would have otherwise been able to put back into its programs.





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Monday, January 1, 2018

No, the Outback Bowl Did Not Rain $55 Million on Tampa Bay



A more conservative estimate pegs the Outback Bowl economic impact at $30 million a year. But that figure came from the non-economist "economist" Mark Bonn, who I previously exposed for using bogus and inflated numbers.

Real economists suggested the impact is closer to 1/10 of Bonn's estimates. But that's not the kind of number that gets tax dollars flowing to your private bowl game and funding the $993,000 salary of said bowl game's CEO.





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