Texas A&M Football
Jason Cook talks atmosphere at new Kyle, sports passes and more
On being with the athletic department for a full year...
"I started getting messages on Linkedin of people congratulating me on my anniversary, and I said, 'Oh my gosh, I didn't miss my wedding anniversary did I?!' I made the official transition on April 15th -- tax day -- last year. Skip Wagner also became president of the 12th Man Foundation on the same day. It has been a wild year, but an incredible year."
On the differences between his last two positions...
"Moving over to athletics is more of a focused effort. As a VP for the university, you're responsible for so much. The scope of the job is just incredibly large, but with athletics, I've been able to focus on just athletics and what I think can really drive the Texas A&M brand. I think the biggest difference is just the pace. We have events every night which means a lot of work is done outside the office. That's a big difference between a more university administrative and an athletics administrative job.
"I have a great team. Alan Cannon, our longterm sports information director and associate athletic director for media relations, was named to the hall of fame and will be inducted in June. That's the caliber of people I get to work with on a day-to-day basis. It's all about team. I love being able to celebrate the success of our coaches and student athletes, but particularly our external affairs team as well."
On working in athletics in general...
"We talk about it a lot, but working in athletics is not a job, it's a lifestyle. It's a commitment. It's a commitment to excellence, it's a commitment to building champions, it's a commitment to winning in everything that we do, not only on the field but in all our efforts to support the team as well. It's not a nine-to-five job. My problem is that I'm an early person, so I tend to get to the office really early in the morning, but of course games tend to go a little late at night. I think I've continued to add a little bit of gray hair to my head, just like you've added no hair to yours."
On the passing of athletic department employee Noel Devin...
"We're a family, not only an athletics family, but an Aggie family. A lot of the local people know that we lost Noel Devin, who worked in our ticket office and was an associate VP in the 12th Man Foundation, in a tragic house fire here in Bryan along with her father. Noel was the glue that held a lot of things together. She was very involved in working with students in the sports pass program and was dedicated to women's basketball and growing our program. She was a part of that team.
"Noel was also very involved in the Kyle Field redevelopment. She was the one actually counting little dots in the seat manifest to see where the season was and if we would be able to take care of our season ticket holders. It's a very big loss and was very upsetting within our department. What you see in times of crisis and tragedy, that's when you see the power of the Aggie family. I know that the Devin family and our ticket office staff have been embraced with the Aggie spirit in the last week. We are just so appreciative of all the thoughts and prairs from the Aggie network."
"She was a behind the scenes person and was very detail orientated and creative with looking at problems and how to solve them. I don't know if we had a more dedicated employee within our family. I think she is definitely worthy of TexAgs' legend status because of that AggieTickets account. There is no telling how many posts she made when walking people through the process and diffusing a lot of upset Aggies. Tickets can get people fired up, but she had an incredible amount of patience. We have a couple of ways we are memoralizing her contributions through a scholarship within the 12th Man Foundation and also one for her father through the vet school."
On the new sports pass system...
"Today is the day. I have a nephew in Rockwall who is coming to Texas A&M this fall and saw that sports passes were going on sale, so his mom starts texting to make sure there would be enough. We should be ok, but there are a lot of changes happening with the sports pass program this year. Before I go through those, I want to make sure everyone understands the commitment is that Kyle Field, regardless of what state of construction, is going to remain the home of the 12th Man. We are not cutting any student seats, and in fact will have a little more than we had last year -- over 31,000. We aren't changing the size of the student section at all.
"As part of the Kyle Field redevelopment, everyone is experiencing a little bit of shared sacrifice. Our students are helping fund a significant portion of the Kyle Field redevelopment and it was going to equate to about $11.80 per game or about $80 a season. When we started looking at the prices of the sports pass, we started to get concerned because now all of a sudden our prices were going over that $300 mark and we thought that was going to price a lot of our students out of football games. We started having some discussions within the athletic department about how we make sure Texas A&M remains the home of the 12th Man.
"What we're going to do is step in and subsidize sports passes by about two million dollars. Jeff Toole, our CFO, did a lot of work at looking at this. We're going to come in and try to drive the cost down for the pass to under $300. It's going to be $290 this year, but the biggest change is that there is no more football only pass and an all-sports pass. We have one pass and we're calling it the 12th Man pass. You pay $290 and youa re not only able to go to the six home football games we have this year, but you're also able to go to 170 other athletics events. What we experienced was that there was a lot of confusion in the market place and it was very hard from a marketing standpoint to get students to the games. Now, it's if you have a sports pass, you get in.
"It's a little change in thinking for our students, but we're really excited about what it's going to do. I think it's going to be huge for soccer in the fall. It's going to be significant for men's basketball this season. There is a lot of news coming out about men's and women's basketball. We want out students to come to these events, so what we're doing is subsidizing the sports pass program. But the 12th Man pass, get into football and over 170 other events.
"If you look, the price is very comparable to where we were last year for football only. If you added up the students' contribution just from a pure ticket standpoint to the redevelopment, we were very concerned they would be priced out of the market. We don't want that to happen. We did some number crunching and are excited about this. They go on sale today and will run through the end of April for returning students. If you're on campus, you better register now because I can't guarantee that you are going to get one in August. You're looking at a freshman class of probably over 9,000 and they are going to eat those things up. We really encourage our current students to register at mysportspass.tamu.edu.
On tickets for next football season…
“The great myth that we sold out for 2014, and that is actually not the case. Our capacity is going to be 106,300 this year. Kyle Field is going to be bigger, so we have some additional season ticket opportunities for fans to go ahead and buy in. We have one package that starts at $350 (per seat). That’s it. $350 for six games at Kyle Field is an incredible value. I think it is worth just the LSU game alone on Thanksgiving. I guarantee you that you won't find a seat for LSU on the secondary market for less than $350. So go ahead, we have this opportunity. Buy for $350, come to all six games this year. It’s going to be a really neat season as you can come into Kyle Field, and as the season progresses, you are going to be part of the redevelopment process.”
More on sports passes…
“If you would have had the system that we previously and added the Kyle Field contributions to that, our sports pass was going to be over $400. You do that, and you have significant impact on basketball, softball, soccer and our Olympic sports. It was untenable. Kudos to Jeff Toole and our finance team for making it work.”
On the survey of long-term season ticket holders and the positives which came from it…
“I remember a lot of discussion within the TexAgs community about a survey that had dropped at the end of January where we went out and surveyed our season ticket holders that had been season tickets holders for three consecutive years. Three or longer. We sent out a survey to about 8,000 accounts. What the SEC is looking at, we know that our attendance is the best in the country. What kind of research can be gleaned to keep people coming back to our stadium? We don’t want to be in a reactionary mode where attendance is starting to drop. What can we look at now? What are the drivers? What do we need to work on?
"In Atlanta, for the SEC men’s basketball tournament, we got the results for the entire league. Aggregate results looking at issues that we see common amongst all 14 SEC schools. We also got, a couple weeks ago, detailed information just for A&M. It's very exciting to go in at start looking at this research. One of the biggest things is our scores for our band are off the charts. I will tell you that at some of the SEC schools, the band is not as beloved as the Aggie band is here at Texas A&M. So we have a lot of schools saying ‘My gosh, we knew your band was good, but everybody likes your band. Nobody likes our band.’ You look at the charts for the SEC, ours sticks way out there. That was one thing that we found.
"We are a little bit different than some of the other places. The second thing where we found that we score well on, from a game day experience, is parking believe it or not. I know a lot of our fans, as they’ve traveled to Ole Miss, Arkansas or Auburn, you look at some of these other schools, parking is just atrocious. It is a very difficult situation. We have some challenges moving forward. We are expanding capacity. Chancellor Sharp is looking at traffic and parking moving forward with the new stadium, but we have a good base to pull from. A lot of good research we can pull from.”
On the negative scores received on the survey…
“Now we’re getting to the bad. Our scores, where we really got dinged, are in three areas. One was restrooms. Just very pitiful, in terms of experience, cleanliness, the wait, the number, you got it. Sam Torn has mentioned many times in interviews about Kyle Field, is that we are going to have more restrooms. That’s a key component. We think a lot of those comments and negative feedback that we got from fans about restrooms will be addressed as part of the Kyle Field project. That was one of the drivers. Of course, if you are a west side season ticket holder, for this season you have one more year of the troughs. So remember the fondly, because they will not be there come the 2015 season.
"Concessions was the other one we really got dinged on in terms of wait lines, variety, and things of that nature. We’re in the process of re-looking at how we do concessions. I can’t talk a lot about that right now, but it is an entirely new approach to how we do concessions at Kyle Field. The one neat thing about that, even though we got some negative results, our concessions staff workers were off the charts. The friendliness, how they greeted patrons, and those kind of things. That speaks to how we are as Aggies. That welcoming spirit that we have. Some good news, some bad news with concessions, but it will be addressed as part of the redevelopment process.”
On the biggest response and change coming…
“Yells. We got a lot of research that the yells are what makes the game day experience really special here at Texas A&M. We had over 850 open-ended responses at the end of the survey. Seventeen percent of all the open-ended responses dealt with audio/video boards, commercials, too much of it. That’s the common feedback. We’ve discussed here on the show that last year we reduced our sponsorship inventory by 30% at Kyle Field, but that wasn’t enough. We’re looking philosophically what we have to do differently as part of this.
"If you’ve been to a game at Kyle Field, the famous line ‘Please direct your attention to 12th Man TV’ is out of the script. It is gone now. Our philosophy is going to be different. The video boards are not the game day experience. Even though we are going to have the largest video board in the country, 1080P HD, people don’t come to games for the video boards. Video boards are there to augment the game day experience. Looking philosophically, now we have some research to drive some of these changes that we are making. Our fans are going to have to realize we do have sponsorship elements, and we do have to generate some revenue, but there is a time and a place to do those.
"Another thing that we found out through the research is a lot of our complaints come when we play on CBS. It’s not just Texas A&M, but a lot of the other schools are talking about this as well. When we play on CBS, they have longer timeouts. They are two minutes and 30 seconds. They have the ability to have seven additional floating timeouts during the game. That is a lot of time. If you look at a timeout being two minutes and 30 seconds, how many BTHO yells do you have to do in two minutes and 30 seconds? Looking at how we utilize those timeouts between the quarters and within the quarters, it’s a different philosophical discussion. But hey, we have some research to drive those discussions, and that’s going to be very helpful as we look to utilizing this new video inventory that we have.”
On surveying basketball season ticket holders…
“We look at the state of SEC basketball, not only at Texas A&M, but across the league. It’s not where we want it to be. We need to build SEC basketball. Even though we had two Final Four teams this year, by the way, we need to build basketball to where it was back in the mid-90’s-early 2000’s for the SEC. We are going to go through the same process. If you are a season ticket holder, men’s or women’s basketball, you are going to get a survey via your e-mail, within the next month or so. We highly encourage you take those survey results, because, as we just told you in football, we are looking and listening to these things.”
On Jeff Gordon and NASCAR…
“We wanted to do it as part of the SEC transition, and we could not find Charlie Shaver, the CEO of Axalta Paints, to do it, but what an incredible opportunity to showcase Texas A&M to a different audience. The engineering folks really took advantage of our one brand approach we have at Texas A&M.”
Full transcript compiled by Ronnie Woodard and Andrew Ball
Never miss the latest news from TexAgs!
Join our free email list
