An NCAA settlement introducing revenue sharing is set to strain school budgets. The most obvious solution: pass the cost on to the most loyal and deep-pocketed fans.
As the clock wound down on the 1949 Iron Bowl, with Auburn clinging to a 1-point lead over archrival Alabama at neutral-site Legion Field, the Tigers’ star quarterback Travis Tidwell lined up hoping to rattle the Crimson Tide’s kicker on an extra-point attempt. He couldn’t quite get a finger on the ball, but the kick went wide all the same, giving Auburn one of its most famous wins ever and setting off a rowdy celebration from fans who ripped up their seat cushions and, in one case, even attempted to place a collect call to the queen of England.
Seventy-five years later, that Tigers team’s abandoned home locker room 100 miles across the state is hosting a new kind of party—as one of Auburn’s hottest tickets.
Last fall, in an upgrade of the university’s 86-year-old Jordan-Hare Stadium, Auburn unveiled three new premium seating options for its football games, including the Locker Room Club, a space evoking the Tidwell era beneath the stadium bowl with a capacity of about 350 fans. Building out the club and five field-level suites cost $1.6 million, but the project immediately paid dividends, with tickets selling out in three days and $1.2 million in gross revenue. The suites, sold on a single-game basis, ranged in price from $16,000 to $65,000 last season, and the returns continue to roll in as Auburn heads into the 2025 season with 50 additional club passes available and the cost of a yearlong club membership rising to $1,575—not counting actual game tickets.
As the college football season begins in earnest on Saturday, Auburn’s home field isn’t the only one sporting a new look. Arizona State’s Mountain America Stadium has new field-level loge boxes priced at $20,000 for four season tickets, for instance, while tiny James Madison has installed four field-level suites, along with a premium area of 564 seats. And more changes are in store for future seasons. Ohio State will debut a new premium seating section in 2026, Penn State is in the midst of a $700 million Beaver Stadium renovation that will add four levels of premium seating by 2027, and Ole Miss plans to introduce Founders Suites the same year, listed for a cool $5 million each.
Premium Prices: A season-long membership in Auburn’s Locker Room Club, beneath the bowl at Jordan-Hare Stadium, costs $1,575—not counting actual game tickets.
Auburn University
The wave of construction reflects a new financial reality in college football that began with the NCAA’s rule changes in 2021 to allow athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness. The intention was to permit endorsement deals in an otherwise amateur sport, but with an overhauled transfer portal simultaneously encouraging players to seek out the highest bidder, the result has been a nationwide arms race that at times has appeared indistinguishable from full-on pay-for-play, with coaches promising star recruits millions in compensation and boosters funneling cash to athletes through NIL “collectives.”
The ante is being significantly raised this year in the wake of a June settlement in the House v. NCAA antitrust case, under which programs will be free to pay their athletes directly—up to $20.5 million per school in 2025-26, and then incrementally more each year for a decade, on top of scholarships and other benefits already on offer.
Even with students returning to campus just this month, the new system is already straining athletic department budgets. Virginia Tech’s athletic director, Whit Babcock, recently warned that, for the Hokies to remain competitive, their athletic budget would need to leap to $200 million, from $144 million. Kentucky’s athletic department, meanwhile, is expecting a net loss of nearly $31 million over the next two fiscal years, and LSU has more than tripled its football budget year-over-year. Many schools also have significant debt on their books already, with the Athletic recently reporting that eight Big Ten athletic departments owe more than $160 million each.
“Everyone in college athletics is trying to find ways to increase revenue streams to fully fund revenue sharing without sacrificing operational costs,” says Rhett Hobart, Auburn’s deputy athletics director for external affairs. And “when you’re looking at driving the most incremental revenue the quickest, your best way to do that is through premium seating. The demand is there, and the returns are immediate.”
While college athletic departments are looking increasingly professionalized—hiring general managers to oversee multimillion-dollar rosters and bringing in corporate CEOs to bolster their business—NCAA programs aren’t necessarily able to pull all of the revenue levers that are available to their NFL counterparts. For example, while many college stadiums have begun selling beer and wine over the past decade, a 2023 Associated Press survey found that 20% of schools still prohibited alcohol sales in public areas. In addition, swaths of the stands are reserved for students on cheap ticket packages.
Some schools are passing on their costs to students through higher fees—$300 annually at South Carolina for an “athletics auxiliary fee”—or plastering brand logos on the grass of their football fields under relaxed NCAA sponsorship rules. Private equity firms have also started to pitch their capital solutions to universities, and the Big Ten is exploring that option, perhaps in exchange for a percentage of future revenue. An alternative route would be lending, with Elevate, a New York-based sports consulting firm, recently announcing a $500 million fund to help colleges maximize their revenue—which in most cases would presumably revolve around facility upgrades.
“We’ll come in and help a school understand what’s the best product mix and pricing for the amount of capital they want to spend,” says Jonathan Marks, the college and global marketplace chief business officer at Elevate, which also advises universities on ticketing and sponsorship strategies. “We can come in and help them monetize and maximize the opportunity to sell these spaces. You only have one shot to sell something that’s new.”
The appeal of luxury suites and premium clubs is clear: significantly more expensive tickets, as well as financial security because they are often sold on a season-long basis. And there is clearly demand waiting to be tapped, especially coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, experts around the sports industry agree. Today’s fans simply prefer more amenities—even if that means attending fewer games.
“Fans want to get closer to the game and to what they love,” says Ed Horne, chief operating officer at hospitality provider On Location. “You want it to feel like a really seamless experience from when they get in the car to drive to the stadium to when they leave. The design of the facilities required to bring the premium opportunities to life is increasingly becoming an expectation as opposed to an aspiration.”
Pro leagues long ago realized the importance of premium seating, and a recent evolution away from traditional luxury suites and toward a wider menu of offerings, including the small semiprivate groups of seats commonly known as loge boxes, has them making more money than ever. In the NFL, for instance, clubs averaged $55 million in premium seating revenue last season, about 70% as much as the revenue from general ticket sales despite representing a small fraction of the total attendance, according to Forbes estimates.
But there are important differences with premium seating at the college level, starting with the target customer. While the NFL typically caters to corporations and the ultra-rich with its premium sales, many college buyers are university donors or families tied to athletic foundations. Flavil Hampsten, Elevate’s president of property sales, told Forbes last year that the firm had found that 34% of the fans buying premium tickets at one college had incomes below $100,000.
At Auburn, contributions to the Tigers Unlimited Foundation earn fans priority points that dictate the premium inventory that is available to them. The goal is to reward the most loyal donors, and turnover is rare, says Hobart, the deputy athletics director. In fact, many families hold on to the same tickets for decades.
Ready For Their Close-Up: In addition to Auburn’s club spaces, the university has created new field-level suites, with seats right next to the action.
Auburn University
Auburn’s Nelson Club, which features a view near midfield, now requires at least $1.1 million in lifetime giving for fans to secure four seats together—up 80% from 2024, and 861% since 2017. Yet despite the high buy-in, the club continues to see growth. The North Club has seen similar appetite—with the minimum contribution rising 52% since last year—and Auburn has a list of 1,000 accounts, representing nearly 3,000 seats, of fans who have expressed interest in an elevated experience, including the sold-out clubs and loge boxes. There is also a waitlist of 100 accounts for suites, which are priced as high as $5,700 per person this season.
The challenge, though, is balance. After modeling demand as part of a stadium-wide recalibration, Auburn raised prices by about 10% on average this year but at the same time lowered prices in underperforming sections.
“You can’t sell out an event without the casual fan,” says Elevate’s Marks. “We’re not just building amazing spaces anymore—we’re asking how to monetize square footage in a way that returns real profit. But you also have to keep the broader fan base engaged, or the ecosystem doesn’t work.”
With ticket sales remaining one of athletic departments’ two biggest cash flows, along with conference TV revenue, Auburn’s Hobart similarly calls out the importance of keeping a broad swath of fans coming to the stadium. That can include add-ons that don’t quite rise to the level of a premium space, such as an upcharge for regular bleacher tickets that come with access to a buffet and a seat cushion.
“It’s never been easier to stay home and watch a game on TV where you have free parking and concessions,” Hobart says. “Our effort is to provide the best possible opportunity at varied price points while creating the best game-day experience that will have a fan desire to leave the simplicity of staying at home and come to our stadium and invest in our program.”
One advantage that colleges have on the pros is a built-in, deeply loyal fan base of alumni, donors and families. That kind of connection also has universities thinking beyond game day, with ancillary events the Friday night before a football game that can turn the entire weekend into a monetizable experience while deepening fans’ ties to the team.
“The commitment to your university can be at a heightened level—people will travel long distances to satisfy their fandom, and the college environment is perfect for that,” says On Location’s Horne. “While the NFL owns Sunday, college sports owns Saturday. We’re all about getting fans closer to the experiences, and we think that expansion is connected to that.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2025/08/29/college-football-teams-desperate-for-cash-to-pay-players-are-rushing-to-add-premium-seats/