Say what you will about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers – from super to stupor – their public relations remains consistent. It still stinks.
From the organization that extorted a stadium, recoiled at the prospect of paying for some Super Bowl-celebration expenses, put up a stink about extra security costs at the RayJay and kissed off John Lynch like some journeyman stumblebum, we bring you yet another update.
The Bucs waited until late Friday of Super Bowl weekend to make a ticket price hike announcement. And just to make sure that the news stayed low profile, the Bucs’ PR flacks once again treated return calls to the media as another avoidable imposition.
Proving again that the National Football League is a market-economy anomaly and the Bucs’ organization haughty at its humblest, the Bucs raised their ticket prices ($2-5 per) in the aftermath of their worst season (5-11) in a decade.
That’s what you do when you have 108,000 fans on a waiting list to buy season tickets. That’s what you do because you can.
That’s how you do it because you are the Bucs.
And this just in.
A Dunedin fan called the Bucs to say he would like to give up the two club seats he has held for two years and maybe try purchasing general seating. The knee-jerk response he got wasn’t exactly an exercise in empathy and had nothing to do with possible re-sales. It had everything to do with the fine print in his 10-year contract. Did he want to run the risk of being sued by the team?
The hard-line, vintage Bucs’ approach is apparently a pre-emptive move against any fans – possibly disgruntled by the Bucs’ two-year spiral into an NFL abyss – deciding that the on-field product was no longer worth sitting through on club seats.
Anyway, the Dunedin fan runs the risk of being sued by the Bucs. If he doesn’t ante up, he’ll be in default, and the Bucs can declare the entire unpaid balance due – including money owed for the next eight years.
No, the Bucs don’t do anything illegal. They’re too astute to do that.
But they don’t do anything to ingratiate themselves with their fans or interact professionally with the media. They’re too arrogant to do that.