Univ. of Michigan basketball season tickets "are sold out for the second year in a row," according to Brendan Quinn of MLIVE.com. The season tickets "represent roughly" 60% of Crisler Center's 12,707 seats. The remaining seats "are allotted to students" (25%) and single-game buyers (15%). UM Senior Associate AD & CMO Hunter Lochmann in an e-mail wrote that tickets "remain available for both." UM will hang a banner recognizing its '14 Big Ten regular-season championship at the Nov. 15 season-opener, and Lochmann said, "We have less than 1,000 (tickets remaining) now and do expect it to ultimately sell out, especially with the banner raising." Quinn notes UM "is looking to keep up with an ongoing uptick in basketball ticket sales." Preseason ticket sales for the '11-12 season "were the university's best in 18 years," dating back to '95. But last season "surpassed that demand" (MLIVE.com, 11/6).
PIE-IN-THE-SKY APPROACH? SI's Andy Staples writes former UM AD Dave Brandon resigned under pressure because he "was a marketing guy in a performance business." Brandon, who formerly was Domino's Pizza Chair & CEO, "learned the hard way that you can't treat fans -- especially those of a team that is falling short of expectations -- like the consumers of $10 pizzas." The modern AD "must be an excellent fund-raiser, and he also must understand how to straddle the line between modernizing the operation and changing it so drastically that fans no longer get that surge of school spirit when they see the players slap the GO BLUE banner on the way to field" (SI, 11/10 issue).
