Coastal Carolina is gonna give away food at football games. Here's how the math works

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Earlier in the week, since Spring Break was still happening in Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago White Sox had a clever idea to try to improve dismal early season attendance. Any CPS family could request free tickets to a Monday afternoon baseball game. So we did, and I took my wife and two daughters to uh, Rate Field.

Even though it was 39 degrees and my kids don’t really understand how baseball works, we had a great time. But even though the tickets were free, everything else certainly wasn’t. Between parking, pretzels, lemonades, a BBQ sandwich and a diet coke…we easily spent over a hundred bucks.

So I was probably in the perfect headspace to check my phone on the way out of the stadium and see the news about an ambitious new program at Coastal Carolina. They want to do the opposite. They’re still gonna charge for football tickets, but they’re gonna make food at their football games free.

Via the release:

Coastal Carolina is still going to have food for sale, like Bojangles and other premium concession options. But anybody with a ticket can grab as many nachos, hot dogs and bags of popcorn that they want.

How can a school afford to give all that food away, especially a program like Coastal Carolina, that doesn’t have the luxury of a massive TV contract to backstop their revenue? Why would a school want to do this, given the potential margins on stadium concessions?

Maybe the math doesn’t pencil out everywhere. But for a variety of reasons, athletic director Chance Miller told me he thinks it makes sense at Coastal Carolina.

And it starts with what kind of program Coastal is.

CCU is in Conway, South Carolina, just a few miles away from Myrtle Beach. Like many other Sun Belt cities, the local population is booming, and the school’s enrollment is in a very healthy place.

But the population is growing, in large part, because of so many folks moving to Myrtle Beach from out of state. Miller joked with me that his neighborhood can “feel like Yankee Stadium” with so many Northeastern transplants. The neighborhoods near campus are growing with a steady stream of retirees, but also families with young kids.

That means that Coastal Carolina’s immediate neighbors might not be instantly inclined to root for Coastal…or even be aware that it exists. “A lot of our new residents are coming from pro markets,” Miller told me. “They have a favorite professional team, but they might not have a college team yet.”

Shoot, the school didn’t even become an independent university until 1993. It doesn’t have the luxury of two hundred years of inertia in building a fanbase. The church of teal football has to accept converts.

So Coastal Carolina has to work to sell themselves, even in football-mad South Carolina. That means doing stuff like partnering with real estate companies to give new transplants tickets to events. It means dramatically building out their internal tickets sales department, to pound the pavement for renewals and new season ticket packages.

And it means the department wants to have a relentless focus on “fan experience.” Which then leads us to the free food.

“We don’t have the luxury of just throwing our doors open, having people sweat for three hours, and then come back,” Miller told me. Coastal wants fans coming to games, sure, but they want them to keep coming back, and ideally, raise their kids to become Coastal fans too. The only way to do that is to make sure people enjoy their experience at the games.

“I can’t control whether we win or lose. We can’t control what 19-year olds will do on the field. But we can control the experience that people have at our games.”

And sure, not having to wait in line for thirty minutes for the privilege of paying nine bucks for a hot dog will probably improve the fan experience. But how can Coastal afford to do this?

As our friends at Sportico pointed out, Coastal is a bit of an anomaly in college sports. They reported zero dollars in concessions revenue on their NCAA budget reports. This is because the university signed a school-wide contract with Aramark in 2020 that covers student dining and athletic facilities, so that money wasn’t being directly collected by athletics. “Aramark has been an outstanding partner on this program,” Miller added to me.

But can ballpark some estimates. Old Dominion reported roughly $75,000 in revenue from parking and concessions, and they averaged slightly more fans a game than Coastal. Louisiana-Monroe, who averaged about 3,000 fewer fans a game, reported roughly $43,000. (Data via the Extra Points Library.)

Given that Coastal’s stadium is capped at about 21,000 people, the school is only giving away four specific concessions items, and that peer schools are reporting mid five-figure revenues from parking, novelty sales AND concessions, I think it is reasonable to assume that Coastal Carolina isn’t giving up that much money by not charging for hot dogs. I’d ballpark it at a low five-figure revenue hole.

Miller is confident that the school can make that money back in a few different ways.

For one, giving some food items away allows the department to lower operating costs elsewhere during games. “We’re looking to move to more of a self-service model, so we won’t need as many staffers handing out food. If we’re giving the products away, we won’t need to pay the same amount of credit card fees. We can move things around to cut down on lines and deploy our resources more efficiently.”

Which is important, because again, Coastal still plans to sell some stuff. “We’ve learned that folks buy more beer if they’re eating popcorn. Free hot dogs doesn’t mean they won’t want Bojangles too.”

There’s also the possibility that free food could lead to more people buying tickets. Miller experienced this policy at his last job at South Carolina, testing out free concessions at specific basketball games during holiday breaks, when it’s traditionally harder to get butts in seats. The experiment worked.

But let’s say that Coastal Carolina doesn’t make up the revenue from beer sales or new single-game tickets. There’s another significant benefit to the athletic department. Data.

Anybody that wants to grab their free hot dogs at a football game will need to scan via a Coastal Carolina Athletics App, which will require an email address.

Miller told me that previously, many fans might come to a Coastal game via a ticket they got at work, or from a friend that had season tickets. The athletic department wouldn’t really have any idea who that person was. But now, the school plans to capture data to be shared with the entire university, not just the athletic department.

“This way, we can get the information we need to make the experience better.”

Typically, consumer data collected and managed by athletic departments significantly trails in sophistication compared to professional sports teams. Since building lifelong fans is a particular priority for the school, getting better information on who is coming into the building, who might have college-aged children, and what folks like to eat and drink at events, could be worth much more than $20,000 in popcorn money.

Also…Coastal Carolina is the kind of place where you can just experiment with stuff

This is the school that hired Joe Moglia to coach the football team. The football field is teal. The university didn’t even exist in the early 1950s. I do not mean this as a pejorative in the slightest, but CCU is not a school that is beholden to decades and decades of tradition and inertia. This is, in many ways, still a college sports expansion team.

Usually, it’s a bit easier to experiment and try new things when you aren’t a behemoth with 200+ years of “This Is The Way We Do Things Around Here.” Miller was effusive in praise for university leadership at multiple levels, creating a culture of not just winning on the field, but taking big swings off the field.

If Coastal Carolina wants to be competitive in a post-House, revenue-sharing world, the school knows it will need to be very creative in how they cut costs and build new revenue streams. The school also plans to be aggressive in the licensing space, hosting other events on campus and in cultivating new donors.

So far, this approach seems to be working. The department is setting ticket sale records in multiple sports, and have substantially improved the season ticket renewal efforts in football. Miller also noted that based on the last 36 hours, they feel “very excited” about the fan response to the initiative.

The only big drawback so far?

“I’ve had about eight or nine ADs call me, complaining that now they feel pressure to give away food.”