When the Auburn football team emerged through a wall of smoke before their game against South Carolina in October, John Joyave was right beside the Tigers. When the Rutgers basketball team ate its pre-game meal before a February game in Louisville, Kentucky, Jason Newcomb dug in with the players.
Joyave and Newcomb are not National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletes. They are fans of the colleges they attended, and they won online auctions for packages billed as “experiences.”
Waiting around after a game to get a player’s autograph is passe for many modern fans. Now they can connect more directly with players and teams, sometimes by going on the field with them.
This year alone, winning bidders have watched from seats in the press box, sat behind the team bench or stood just outside the end zone for the final minutes of a football game. Some have toured arenas and broadcast booths.
Others have arranged for their children to retrieve the tee after an opening kickoff or to serve as a ball girl or ball boy at a basketball game.
Some of the auctions have been won for less than US$100, others for thousands of dollars. The record price on the site run by CBS Sports was US$15,800, for sideline passes and entry to a pre-game party ahead of a Southern California 2008 football game against Ohio State.
“It’s irresistible,” Joyave, a 1986 Auburn graduate, said of the “game-day smoke entrance” experience he won.
“You’re there as the stadium fills up and the band comes out, and you get in position with the fire extinguishers as the players come out — and you just let go,” Joyave said.
The market is not limited to top-ranked programs — a bidder paid US$1,000 this year to play golf with Shane Davis, the men’s volleyball coach at Loyola Chicago — but it should come as no surprise that some of the nation’s most successful football programs are among the busiest participants.
Susan Staats Sidwell, a lifelong Alabama fan, said she could barely speak when she won the right to meet Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban on the set of his weekly radio show in 2011.
“It sounded like I was crying,” she said.
She had won an auction to attend the show at the Tuscaloosa restaurant where it was broadcast and to ask Saban the first question from the audience.
Sidwell, who attended Alabama-Birmingham, saw the auction as an opportunity to learn more about Saban.
His success as a leader inspires the way she runs her two methadone clinics, she said.
Since that encounter, Sidwell has paid as much as US$1,800 to return, winning the auction 12 more times. She usually brings three Crimson Tide-loving employees from her businesses.
“What he teaches are life skills,” Sidwell said of Saban. “He talks about how everybody has a different role in a championship, whether it’s the water boy or the quarterback. That’s what we want in our employees — whether you’re answering the phone or taking the money, you have to be the best.”
Prices for the experiences can fluctuate based on a team’s on-field performance, the number of bidders aware of the auction, and the particular experience and sport.
“What’s appealing to fans is they feel a part of the institution and the team, even if they don’t know the outcome of the game,” said Patty Hirsch, the general manager of CBS Interactive Advanced Media.
Hirsch said that “awareness of the auctions is not as high as it should be,” but she said the average number of experience auctions involving the most active colleges had approximately doubled from 2008 to last year, to 15 annually.
The fine print of the auctions routinely cautions that winning bidders must be fans of the colleges whose experiences they are seeking, the equivalent of Sotheby’s telling potential buyers of a Warhol that they cannot bid if their real passion is for Matisse.
The disclaimer for the Alabama “press box fan experience” demands that winners be Alabama fans, but it bars them from proving it by cheering there. For the smoke entrance experience at Auburn — where the athletics staff spray smoke at the Tigers’ football players as they run onto the field at Jordan-Hare Stadium — the winner and a guest “must be Auburn University fans and must dress and act in a professional and courteous manner.”
Otherwise, their experience may be cut short, without a refund.
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