there are typically 2 or 3 & sometimes 4 levels of management per ground level employee. and in the private sector i must say i loved watching upper/senior management get the cutbacks…how to increase productivity 101, eliminate the redundancy at the highest levels…force them all to take on more work not only cause the same work is spread out over fewer people…but now their all sweating for their jobs ’cause no one knows who is next. saw it happen with several of my clients.

You two are absolutely right!

what brings in more revenue? Ticket sales or TV revenue? I think the obvious answer would be TV revenue. Right? Look at it this way…..the average ticket cost was $61 in 2007 (according to Forbes magazine, so the Lions would be making 65000 * 61 per game = $3,965,000 just in ticket sales. Multiply that by 8 home games, and they would bring in $31,720,000 over the season in ticket sales alone (they actually made 44 million in gate receipts in 2007, including club seatng) (Total revenue = $204 million). Each team in the NFL gets a share of the league’s revenue from all TV contracts…..and that share is over 100 million dollars per year…..so the TV revenues are definitely a key to teams being able to pay their expenses.

That said why do the costs of tickets keep rising, even in the most obvious of hardest times (average ticket costs across the league are up to $72 for 2009)? Why wouldn’t the Lions (and other teams that are having difficulty selling out games) greatly reduce the cost of their tickets in order to sell out as many games as possible, thereby increasing the revenue they receive from the NFL’s TV profit sharing policy? There are about 5000 tickets that did not get sold this week…..so why not lower the overall ticket costs by a minimum of $5 each in an attempt to sell more tickets? Let’s say that the average cost of a ticket to a Lion’s game decreased by $10, from $61 – $51 each. 51 * 65000 = $3,315,000 per game (a difference of only $650,000. Wouldn’t people be more likely to buy tickets that cost $10 less?

In reality, the Lions are having a hard time selling CLUB LEVEL seats. Here is the current cost chart for those seats (if it works….if not, it is on Detroitlions.com):

Club seats cost an average of $183 each!! No wonder we can’t sell them out! So, instead of lowering the cost of every ticket by $10, why not just discount club level seats? I think that greed is still ruling old man Ford, but logic is eluding him. He would make more money by selling out every game, in TV revenues alone, than he will by keeping club level ticket costs at the current price and not selling out every game.

is nationally televised major (parent) network carrying the game

What the hell? What stations do you watch the games on?