Reusse: Gophers, not Vikings, need ticket surcharges

The University of Minnesota athletic department refers to the surcharge for season tickets as "scholarship seating." The Minnesota Vikings Football Club, LLC and its lackeys at the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority refer to the surcharge as "stadium builder's licenses."

The Gophers, currently the more successful of the two big-time football teams in the Twin Cities, announced a surcharge plan this week that they hope will be adding an annual $2.2 million to the coffers by 2017.

The Vikings have been dunning their customers for months to gain commitments for $125 million in surcharges before the new stadium, the Taj Ma Zygi, opens in 2016.

The hope with the Gophers' budgeters would be that the first full-scale attempt at a surcharge for football season tickets will be successful, and that "scholarship seating" will bring in larger amounts of dollars in the decades ahead.

I'll throw out $3 million as an average amount the Gophers will be able to collect annually in surcharges at TCF Bank Stadium over the next couple of decades.

Let me try this: $3 million x 20 years = $60 million. Gosh, that would put the Gophers less than halfway home to the Vikings' initial gouge in the year 2034, by which time concussions and torn knees and mothers unwilling to have their babies grow up to be football players will have made the game as we know it today extinct.

There are a couple of factors that Vikings apologists — and my, we have a lot of them — will bring up to suggest that their ticketholders are getting a better deal on surcharges than are those of the Gophers.

Second, the legend is that the person paying for a Vikings seat license will own the seat and be able to do the following: hold it, transfer it or sell it.

Lost in the attention given to the Vikings seat licenses is the monumental increase in ticket prices. For instance: A pal of mine has held four seats downstairs between the 30-yard lines for decades. The seat licenses are $9,500 per, and the per-game for a ticket is going from $150 in 2013 in the Metrodome to $400 for the first year in The Zygi.

OK, but you can sell those seats in the future, and get back the $9,500 (or more). That's the Vikings' sales pitch.

Warning: If you plan to recoup the surcharge, I wouldn't wait too long to put the seat licenses on the market. Once the luster wears off and we've all gotten used to the wonders inside The Zygi, and become repulsed at seeing songbirds smashed to smithereens against the front windows, the NFL trend of recent years will continue:

Old-line fans, from their late 40s and beyond, are going to say, "I don't want to have a drunk behind me screaming 'Bleep the Bears' all afternoon. I'm going to stay home and watch the Vikings in luxurious, 60-inch HD."

Norwood Teague, the Gophers athletic director, might talk as pretty as a Mercedes salesman, but there's an element of truth when he explains "scholarship seating" by saying:

"… I don't know how moving forward, we can stay out of the red [as an athletic department], even with the Big Ten money, with the rising costs that we have."

Steve LaCroix, the Vikings vice president of sales and marketing, did not have that element on his side when saying the Football Club, LLC worked to be "very fair" and "as reasonable as we could" in implementing the plan for $125 million in seat licenses.

The bottom line is the Vikings — even with the piddling millions the team has added to increase its revenue stream — made the choice to further gouge the public to prevent Zygi Wilf and partners from putting a reasonable share of their own money into a stadium that is going to immediately turn their $600 million purchase into a $2 billion-plus asset.

It's simple, really. The Gophers' football ticket surcharge is a need. The Vikings' surcharge is a want.