JD wrote a great article in the Houston Chronicle on the financial advantage UH can have with high profile games in Reliant Stadium. Here are some bullet points taken from the article.
2026
UH will pay Oregon St. $250,000.00 to play at TDECU, the same UH received to play in Oregon. Oregon will receive 300 comp. tickets.
UH will pay Sourthern $400,000.00 to play at TDECU, along with 125 pizzas, 400 comp. tickets, and an option to purchase 1,000 extra tickets.
2027
UH can earn up to $3M, or 30% of gross ticket revenue, excluding suites, for the LSU game at Reliant Stadium. UH is guaranteed at least $2.5M, with the payout increasing on a sliding scale to $3M if ticket sales reach 55,000. UH will receive 600 comp. tickets in “mutually agreed upon locations” and up to 2,500 tickets on consignment for current students.
UH will pay Prairie View A&M $425,000 or its 2027 appearance at TDECU Stadium, along with 400 comp. tickets and the option to purchase 1,000 more.
UH has the lowest athletic budget of all the P4s. Like I mentioned in a previous post, if the finances are right, UH has to be open to scheduling high profile games at Reliant Stadium. Home field advantage is where the money is.
No. The LSU game is the Texas kickoff game, essentially a bowl game to start the season. So was the OU game, so was the WSU game. We should work on filling our home stadium, and get to the point where we’re discussing expansion. That won’t happen if the association with our own home stadium is that we only play mid tier games there.
While it does makes sense to play “big” teams at Reliant, I do wonder about how much a typical home game makes for the athletic department and how that compares to the income from a game at Reliant.
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Duce630
(DustinK - Damn it feels good to be a Cougar. -Dwight Davis)
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I would expect the Reliant games to make more for UH, or at least its about the same and the Reliant just gives some additional prestige and more eyeballs.
georgia and florida gets paid 7.5 million each to pay their annual game at the Atlanta dome. coogs better figure out a way to capitalize on reliant before ut or the ags find some way to make it their own with lsu or someone else.
My impression was UH built a stadium on campus to be used for home games on campus. If UH switches games to a different field every time another school lifts its skirt at us, why the heck did we build it?
IF UH could utilize Reliant Stadium as a place to host LSU for an annual game to help sell 60,000+ tickets and attract a national TV audience to such a “big event” while making both schools several million dollars, we would be foolish not to pursue it.
The opportunity to fill TDECU on a regular basis has nothing to do with one big game a year but rather it has everything to do with UH developing a loyal following of former students and related supporters who want to (and will) buy season tickets for UH games with our Big 12 opponents.
[NOTE: Our weakness in former student (season ticket) support for Big 12 conference football games is the primary reason UH has the lowest athletic budget of any P4 program in the nation.]
I’m generally not a fan of moving games to reliant. It can be financially advantageous but you have to compare against how much you’d make if the game was at home. You don’t gain the full amount of revenues (for one because there are costs) but also because you are giving up what you would have made at home.
Also, taking away your top game can impact season ticket sales. And if you include it in the package, you can take the costs of the tickets off the revenue because that’s not free (and if included in the deal, you can be assured the cost was accounted for in the deal and not free).
It’s also generally difficult to get students there because of ticket cost and travel. We already struggle getting students to games at times so you’re adding to that.
Finally, Reliant can feel pretty sterile to me to be honest. I much prefer watching games on campus. There are other trade offs and that’s just a few.
I’m not saying never do it or that the dollars can’t make sense. Just saying there are a lot of tradeoffs and the big revenue number you see can be misleading.
It’s been in Jacksonville since the 1930s but starting in 2026, the game will alternate between Atlanta and Tampa, then return to Jacksonville in 2028. The reason for the move is not money motivated but necessary due to the massive renovations happening at the stadium in Jacksonville. The Jaguars are playing the 2027 season in Orlando.
I’m all about making money, and if it is a kickoff game scenario I’m fine with it. Even a yearly rivalry game like Ark v Ags at Jerry World. If it’s our end of a home and home though, no thanks. That is peak little brother behavior.
I wouldn’t even mind it for our half of a home & home if we were expecting a strong pro-coog crowd there, like for Wazzu a couple years back. Part of me wishes we’d play all our September home games there, for reasons that I think are obvious.
I’ll probably feel this conviction a lot more strongly around 2:30 pm on September 5th.
