A Day of Jaguar Football

[tufsu1]

^ but could be viewed on the web for free, which doesn't help out on resolving the ticket sales/black-out problems.

yes...because watching a game on a choppy computer feed is so much better than seeing it live!

[copperfiend]

^^What parking issue?
Game was blacked out.

So. There were still 60k people there.

[BridgeTroll]

There are no parking issues at the stadium... unless you mean some people cannot park within 1 block of the stadium and have to pay a few bucks to park.  Then there is a huge issue.

[thirdeye]

Did they ever get that parking issue ironed out around Jaguars Stadium?  And...that game was not blacked out was it?

"HU"

I wish we had parking issues that would mean the games are sold out and a lot more people are tailgating. Most people show up 12 and go straight to their seats

[finehoe]

From the 17-Dec-09 Washington Post:

Jaguars' show is one few people in Jacksonville can see

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 17, 2009; D01

JACKSONVILLE, FLA. --John Peyton has a problem no mayor in an NFL city should ever want. Interest in his city's football team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, has waned the past few years. Ticket sales have plummeted. The Jaguars' games, which have been nowhere close to being sold out, have been kept -- by league rules -- from local television. And even though the Jaguars would make the playoffs if the season ended today, they hold more fascination nationally for the places they might end up someday, like Los Angeles or London, than for anything they've done on the field.

Then on Monday a rare piece of good news appeared. It turned out that after all kinds of pleading, wheedling and cajoling, civic leaders had managed to get enough seats sold to call Thursday night's game against the Indianapolis Colts a sellout and thus be shown on local television. Peyton rushed to the stadium for a news conference.

By the time he arrived, at just before noon, television cameras lined the plaza before the stadium's main entrance. In a city where only a few years before the Jaguars played important playoff games in front of huge throngs of fans desperate for tickets, the sellout announcement, that would normally be made with a drab press release, had instead become a very big deal. A Plexiglas lectern bearing the city's insignia was put in place, a nearly 7-foot-tall gold and teal team mascot named Jaxon de Ville lounged on an enormous statue of a jaguar and a quartet of cheerleaders stood like jubilant sentries beside the beaming Peyton.

"This is an indication that this movement is gaining traction," Peyton gushed.

"What better way to silence our critics," added Carl Cannon, a former newspaper publisher who helped lead the original surge to bring the NFL to town in the early 1990s.

From atop the jaguar statue, the mascot nodded and the cheerleaders shook their pompons.

But there are critics. Plenty of critics. People who say that no matter how many games the Jaguars win the franchise is fighting an inevitable reality that professional football can not last here much longer, that the lack of sellouts are not simply an anomaly in a bad economy but a sign of something far worse: a market that just isn't strong enough to support the NFL long term.

"It's a young team in a young city and there are just not great demographics," said Michael Cramer, the former president of the Texas Rangers and an assistant professor in the sports business department at New York University, who has studied the Jacksonville market. "No one has established the brand. Someone has to be at the bottom [of the NFL] and it's Jacksonville.

"Most cities have -- when a number of people stop going to the games -- another layer who will at least go to one or two games a year, which can keep the franchise going until more people buy tickets. Jacksonville is missing that next layer. They don't have much in the way of reserves. They don't have a strong bench."

Ultimately, the feeling around the NFL goes, the Jaguars will have to leave.

There are other franchises in danger, teams in bad stadiums, unable to keep up with the teams from the larger markets. Yet none of them -- Minnesota, Oakland, St. Louis and Buffalo -- seems to be in the kind of danger that looms over Jacksonville.

Still, a dedicated group of people like Peyton and Cannon pound away at the threat. Only 15 years ago, when the NFL awarded an expansion franchise to the city in Florida's farthest upper-right corner, this seemed a certain success. The Jaguars, in their first season, soared to the top of the league in revenues and played in the AFC championship game twice before they were a decade old.

But then came the steady decline of ticket sales as well as the playoff games that had become an expectation. The model franchise of small-market success quickly spiraled into irrelevance. Then the talk of moving began, even with a stadium lease that is supposed to keep the Jaguars here until 2030.

On Monday, former offensive lineman Tony Boselli, the franchise's most important player and the only one to be lauded in its ring of honor, stood near the news conference, shaking his head at another set of questions he has grown tired of hearing.

"Because of one year when we have blackouts we aren't an NFL market? That's ridiculous," he said. "Because Tampa had blackouts for years they aren't an NFL market? What about Seattle?"

He chuckled as he thought of Los Angeles, a place where he played college football, and the most often mentioned destination of the Jaguars. The vision of a half-empty L.A. Coliseum on Sunday afternoons, when the Raiders played there, seemed to amuse him.

"You want to talk about blackouts? What about L.A.?" he said. "And now you want to say that's the savior?"

He scoffed. If anything, he said, the problem in Jacksonville is that the team had too much success too early.

"People got spoiled," he said.

Then, when the team started to lose on the field in the middle part of this decade, the fans lost interest. Winning them back has been hard.

A few years ago, the team made the decision to place tarps over eight entire seating sections and pieces of others, cutting the stadium's attendance from 76,877 to 67,164. The idea was to make the remaining tickets more desirable and hopefully head off blackouts. But recovery was slow. Then, last year, everything collapsed.

The fall of the economy hit Jacksonville hard. Peyton boasts of his city's port, converging interstates and three rail lines, but the boom years were fed by a thriving real-estate market. When the economy crumbled last year, new construction dried up. Local contractors and their subsidiaries were a big part of the team's season ticket base, the team's senior vice president and chief financial officer Bill Prescott said. When they lost work, Jaguars tickets were the first things to go. Season ticket sales fell from 47,000 last year to just above 27,000 this year, Prescott said.

With a base of 47,000 season tickets it is possible to sometimes sell out a stadium the size of Jacksonville's. But a base of 27,000 makes sellouts almost impossible. The fact that the Jaguars were 5-11 last season didn't help.

But slowly a good team is emerging. A strong draft this year gave the Jaguars several players around which to build. And running back Maurice Jones-Drew, at just 24, has turned into one of the league's most gifted players -- a brutish runner who crashes into tacklers rather than eluding them. It's a group that helped the Jaguars build a 7-5 record before last week, making the once-preposterous notion of the playoffs a legitimate possibility.

And with so much good going for them, the Jaguars still did not inspire last Sunday. The game was blacked out and even with a strong day of walkup sales, there were gaps of teal seats in the crowd. Then once the game started, the Jaguars were flat, pounded physically by the Miami Dolphins who seemed -- at times -- to roll over them at will. Jones-Drew, the once-invincible back, had just 59 yards on Sunday. Even still, the Jaguars had several chances to win the game in the fourth quarter, failing each time. A festive pregame euphoria drained in the late-day gloom.

That evening the radio call-in shows were filled with dread as fans fretted about an unimaginative offense and worried aloud that the team's time in Jacksonville was limited. Again and again they raised the name of the one person people here believe will be the salvation of the franchise, a beloved native son, University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow. If only the Jaguars could draft him next year, the thinking is, everything can be good again. This despite the fact the team has given no signals that it is interested in having Tebow as its next quarterback or that he is even seen by the NFL as a legitimate professional passer.

Prescott has heard this, too -- it's impossible to go anywhere in Jacksonville and not hear it. But he wonders just how many more tickets Tebow would really sell. Historically, he said, the Jaguars have had 4,000-to-5,000 no-shows on days after a late Gators game. This, he surmises, is the passionate Florida following that would perhaps buy extra seats to watch Tebow play. The Jaguars, who are averaging 47,637 this year, need to sell much more than 5,000 tickets a game to be viable.

Yet on Monday, as sunlight danced off the windows of the stadium on the kind of day a mayor could dream of, Peyton smiled.

"I think the economy has been a big part of it," he said in explanation of why attendance has fallen so much. "We have a large stadium in a small market. But we're going to work through this."

He said he has been encouraged by the attitude of the team's owner Wayne Weaver, who has been a champion of the city's long-term viability. It has long been Weaver's belief that if the team can just hold on for another 15 years, Jacksonville will have grown enough to be a wonderful NFL city. Those who have approached Weaver with dreams of buying the team and moving it far away, have been met with the same resistance. He wants it to stay here.

And yet on a day when the simple announcement of a sellout turned into a rally, when the mayor said enthusiastically, "I think we've exceeded expectations," by selling out a game, the question still lingered.

How much longer can Jacksonville hold on?

[BridgeTroll]

Pretty good article...

[reednavy]

Good article, and Tony's words are very well said. I just don't understand the Tebow bandwagon, he is a horrible QB when it comes to pass efficiency, especially when throwing down field, and that doesn't look good in the eyes of the NFL.

There are other good QBs like Sam Bradford, Tony Pike, and Colt McCoy that are better than Tebow as true QBs.

[JaxNative68]

^ but could be viewed on the web for free, which doesn't help out on resolving the ticket sales/black-out problems.

yes...because watching a game on a choppy computer feed is so much better than seeing it live!

no one said it was better, just available for those who couldn't make it.  Something is better than nothing.

[Clem1029]

Maybe it's not my soapbox to get on, but I guess someone has got to...

...our town has it's one shot this year on national TV, in what has amounted to a fantastic game, and not a few of our regulars are in other threads (i.e., not at the game)...

And not one comment going here? Not one thought about how our city is looking on national TV? Not one comment on how the team is representing so far?

Is the priority really state and national issues and that all politics isn't exactly local?

/soapbox

[reednavy]

What?

[thelakelander]

Maybe it's not my soapbox to get on, but I guess someone has got to...

...our town has it's one shot this year on national TV, in what has amounted to a fantastic game, and not a few of our regulars are in other threads (i.e., not at the game)...

And not one comment going here? Not one thought about how our city is looking on national TV? Not one comment on how the team is representing so far?

Is the priority really state and national issues and that all politics isn't exactly local?

/soapbox

Looks like a good game so far.  Some of our regulars are at the game.  However, I'm a Dolphins (I did attend Sunday's game) and Heat fan and the Heat are playing the Magic on TNT.  So I'm flipping to the Jags game during commercial breaks.

[thelakelander]

Come on Nelson! Man up Jax. Your playoff dreams are on the line!

[thelakelander]

Close but no cigar. Indy wins again.

[DavidWilliams]

I would immediately cut Nelson. Garrard wouldn't be a distant second a nine year vet has to be better than this. That F'ing sucked. Every opportunity to win and they can't get it done....SUX!

[thelakelander]

Chad Henne would have completed those passes!