Last year, folks in Jacksonville mobilized to sell enough tickets to permit all regular-season games to be televised locally.
This year, they need to work even harder.
With less than four weeks to go until the start of the regular season, the team needs to sell 5,000 season tickets in order to avoid blackouts in 2011.
And so Jacksonville mayor Alvin Brown has gotten personally involved, via a letter sent to the team’s e-mailing list.
“With the new National Football League season about to get underway, it’s time for everyone to get back to football,” the letter states. “Here in Jacksonville that means it’s time for all of us to step up and show our support of our home town Jaguars.”
In other words, “Buy more tickets!”
“With the NFL lockout, it has been a difficult off-season for many NFL teams. Jaguars’ ticket sales were slowed by the lockout and now the team faces a Herculean task in trying to sell over 5,000 season tickets in the next few weeks in order to have a chance to avoid the dreaded blackouts for home games this season,” Brown writes.
In other words, “Buy more tickets!”
And if there was any doubt, Brown eventually makes a plea to . . . “Buy more tickets!”
“It’s Go Time!” Brown says, channeling his inner Izzy Mandelbaum. “That means for everyone here in Jacksonville, it’s time to step up and go purchase Jaguars tickets now.” He then provides the phone number and web address for doing so, and he points that, even if folks can personally go to the games, tickets can be purchased and donated to the USO.
Brown’s plea does nothing to lessen the perception that Jacksonville will continue to face the threat of losing the Jaguars unless and until the task of selling the non-premium seats ceases to be an annual exercise in community pride, honor, and/or sacrifice. We support the efforts to help the team succeed in Jacksonville, and we hope that they can pull it off. Eventually, however, folks in Jacksonville will grow weary of the annual sky-is-falling routine. Indeed, at some point, a fallen sky is better than constantly being made to fear the possibility of it.