Are you screwing over your audience?

I love pro football. So much so that when my team isn’t playing, I’ll gladly watch any other two teams play each other, regardless of whether either of them is in contention, even if it’s a lopsided score. So much so that I’ve had Dolphins season tickets for the past fifteen years, despite the Dolphins being the only one of Miami’s four pro sports teams not to make it to their respective championship round in those fifteen years. So much so, in fact, that even after I packed up and moved to Los Angeles, I still renewed my season tickets merely in the hopes of making to back to Miami for at least a couple of their home games this year. You get the idea.

As a long-time Dolphins season ticket holder I’ve endured years of non-playoff seasons, lame coaching, terrible quarterbacking, lousy parking, bad concession stands, etc., all for the love of attending the game. And since putting up with all of the above has been by choice, I’ve got no complaints. Here’s what’s not by choice: the regular season has sixteen games, eight of which are at home, so as a season ticket holder you’re buying a package of eight equally priced tickets, right? Wrong. You’re buying ten equally priced tickets, two of which are for exhibition games which take place before the season and have no meaning whatsoever.

These “preseason” games, as the league refers to them in an attempt to make them sound more meaningful, are used by teams primarily to figure out which new players belong on the team, which aging players still have what it takes, with just a little bit of breaking in the highly regarded new guys and implementing new schemes and playbooks. The star players might play for the first quarter of the game before they head for the bench, as much to make sure that they don’t get injured before the season begins as anything else.

And you know what? I kind of get a kick out of it. You see things in the preseason you just don’t see in the regular season. Third-string rookie quarterbacks getting significant playing time. Coaches having the guts to go for it on fourth down from their own twenty yard line. All kinds of fun, silly stuff.

But this is all because, when it comes down to it, these aren’t real games. If a team is losing by a few points with a minute left, they’ll automatically follow whatever path ensures the game doesn’t in a tie, so as to avoid having to go to overtime. The two Dolphins players non-football fans are most likely to have heard of, Jason Taylor and Zach Thomas, both sat out the first two preseason games because they’re a little old to be playing in games that don’t count. This past weekend, one game was called off due to lightning in the third quarter (as it should have been), and no one involved with the game even considered rescheduling the remainder of the game for another time because, well, it’s the preseason and no one cares. Season ticket holders generally give away their preseason tickets if they don’t want to attend, because these tickets have no resale value whatsoever. So you give them away to friends, and not your good friends either, because they’d be insulted.

So why on earth does the NFL force season ticket holders to buy tickets for these preseason games, at the same price as the real games? In short, because they can. The popularity of their sport allows them to get away with things that a less popular sport couldn’t. Want proof? The baseball Marlins, who play in the same stadium, sell tickets for as little as four dollars and yet they can rarely fill more than fraction of the stadium unless it happens to be the World Series. And yet the football Dolphins (and every other NFL team) can gouge their season ticket holders with a ridiculous twenty percent surcharge which amounts to little more than a scam, and we football fans swallow it.

For better or worse, the NFL has recognized that it’s in a position where it can get away with screwing the most loyal members of its audience, and has chosen to go ahead and screw them. Does your organization do business this way? The NFL seems to have gotten away with it – for now. A few more Michael Vick type scandals and maybe the NFL’s greediness catches up with them, but I doubt it. They’re screwing their customers. Are you?

If you said yes, then the next question is whether your organization is as popular and bulletproof as the National Football League. Do people wear jerseys featuring your company’s name and get drunk while watching your employees carry out their workday? If you said no to that last one, then maybe you want to think about whether it’s a good idea for your organization to screw its audience the way the NFL does.