We talk a lot about stadium expansion, increased ticket sales, and the growth in season ticket sales for Virginia Tech football, but no one has ever asked the question, "How does that translate into real dollars in Virginia Tech's pocket?"

Since 1993, when the Hokies started their bowl run, the average cost of a Tech football ticket has increased from roughly $20 to $31 (in 2002). Attendance is up dramatically, with sellouts becoming the norm instead of the WVU-UVa exception, and stadium capacity has ebbed and flowed.

With South end zone expansion nearly complete, Lane Stadium's capacity will increase to 63,459 seats, up from a previous high of 56,272 in 2000. As the Hokies get ready to open their expanded stadium and make more money from ticket sales than ever before, it bears taking a look back at ticket revenue during the Beamer Bowl era (1993-2001).

Using ticket costs, season ticket sales figures, and game attendance figures (plus a few wild guesses), we'll take a stab at trying to figure out what VT's football ticket revenue has been since 1993.

As usual, if you're an "executive summary" type of person, you can skip over the next few sections and go straight to the "Revenue Calculations" section. If you like to know how the results were reached, in mind-numbing detail, then slog your way through the next few sections for explanations.

To figure out ticket revenue, all we need is attendance figures for each game from 1993-2001, and the cost of a ticket for each game. You then multiply the attendance figure by the ticket cost to get revenue.

Of course, comp tickets (which are free tickets given out to friends of the university, recruits, players' families, high school coaches, etc.) reduce ticket revenue. So we'll need to estimate how many comp tickets are given out for each game, and subtract that out of the revenue total.

And what about student tickets? Students don't pay for tickets per se, but they do pay an athletics fee, and that athletic fee money goes to the athletic department, to help compensate for student tickets and other items and expenses.

But wait, sometimes students pay for tickets, because a couple of years ago, VT introduced student season tickets, so students could pay a nominal fee and get reserved seats. And students buy guest tickets for friends and family.

And in some years, season tickets were discounted over single-game tickets, and in other years, they weren't.

So calculating ticket revenue sounds easy at first, but quickly gets muddied up. We'll have to make some assumptions and shortcuts so we don't get bogged down in the details.

Given all the mitigating factors, we'll make the following assumptions, in order to simplify our calculations:

• The number of "comp," or free tickets, distributed for each game will be estimated at 4,000. During the 2000 season, VT released information that indicated 4,450 comp tickets were reserved. That gives us an idea of the magnitude of comp tickets, and numbers for individual seasons could be higher or lower (Tech has dropped the number of comp. tickets it distributes significantly in recent years, we're told). We'll set the figure to 4,000 for every season from 1993-2001.

• We won't attempt to calculate the revenue from student tickets versus general public game tickets. We'll assume that the athletic department gets compensated for the full value of a student ticket, meaning that if a game ticket costs $28 for the general public, the athletic department gets $28 for each free student ticket picked up. We realize this assumption is fundamentally flawed, but it simplifies our calculations drastically. We can now say that ticket revenue = (attendance - comp tickets) multiplied by ticket cost, without worrying about how student tickets affect revenue.

• Revenue from student season ticket sales, which were introduced within the last couple of years, will not be estimated and will be ignored. Instead, we'll assume that the extra revenue helps out with making the previous bullet item more accurate.

• Decreased revenue from kids' tickets will not be factored in. In some years, VT offers kids' tickets at reduced prices for some games, in order to increase attendance (for example, selling kids' tickets to a Temple game for just $10). This will be ignored, as the number of kids' tickets sold and how they affected revenue would complicate the calculations.

• Season ticket buyers did not receive a discount over the cost of single-game tickets from 1993-1996, but they did in 1997 ($1 per game), 1998 and 1999 ($3 per game). These discounts will be factored into the revenue figures by multiplying the discount by the number of season tickets sold, and subtracting that from revenue for each game.

• Season tickets sold out in 2000 and 2001, so single-game ticket prices used in calculations will be the same as season ticket prices. In 2000 and 2001, any unused opponent tickets were made available to the public at prices higher than VT season ticket prices, but these tickets will be ignored, and it will be assumed that all tickets sold were sold at VT season ticket prices.

Ticket Prices

Here are single-game and season ticket prices for Hokie home games from 1993-2001:

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