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NCAA Ticket Lottery Ties Up Fans' Money for Months

Does NCAA mean "No Chance At Admission?"

By Joseph S. Enoch
ConsumerAffairs.com

April 4, 2008

• Class Action Challenges NCAA Ticket Sales • NCAA Ticket Lottery Ties Up Fans' Money for Months

The National Collegiate Athletics Association has implemented a ticketing practice that requires consumers to pay money just for the opportunity enter a lottery for the much-coveted men's and women's basketball tournament tickets.

The NCAA is now charging consumers a nonrefundable “service charge” that goes as high as $9 per ticket just to enter a competitive lottery, according to application forms for the 2009 men's and women's tournaments.

The ticket applications for the early rounds for next year's men's basketball tournaments are due March 1 and require the consumer to pay about $200 plus a $9 service charge for each ticket. Consumers can apply for as many as eight tickets.

For the next three months the NCAA will sit on all that money before finally drawing applications in June. If a consumer's application is drawn, he or she will receive the tickets they paid for back in March. If not, they will receive a refund for the tickets while the NCAA keeps the service charge – as much as $72 total – and presumably all the interest earned in the meantime.

Early-round applications are submitted to the arenas where the games will be played, rather than to the NCAA. The arenas get a small cut from the service charge, but most of it goes to the NCAA, according to an official at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, N.C., host to six games of the first two rounds of the 2009 men's tournament. The official asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to talk about the matter.

Final Four and Championship tickets for both the women's and men's 2009 tournament are purchased directly from the NCAA's website where consumers can complete an online application that again enters a competitive lottery.

Consumers can submit up to 10 applications, two tickets each, for those games but are charged a nonrefundable $6 service charge for each entry. The tickets cost as much as $170 each. For these last two rounds, the NCAA sits on the cash for five months before informing consumers whether they are one of the lucky few with a ticket. The application does not specify when a refund, minus the service charge, will be made.

One consumer who brought this to the attention of ConsumerAffairs.com said he applies for NCAA tournament tickets every year and that last year was the first year the NCAA implemented this service charge. The consumer wished to remain anonymous for fear of being “blacklisted” from further NCAA events, he wrote in an e-mail.

The NCAA did not draw his application for the 2008 tournament and took nine months to issue a refund, he wrote.

“The bastards kept our money for nine months and then had the gall to keep our $72!” He wrote. “Given the sheer number of applicants for tickets versus the number of available seats, they have to be making a killing on this.”

Unheard of

One consumer advocate who specializes in ticketing scams said he had never heard of any ticketing lottery that charges consumers ahead of time for the tickets and, worse yet, doesn't refund all the money.

“Typically you throw your name in the hat and if it's drawn, then they charge you for the tickets,” said Russ Haven, legislative counsel for the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

“You don't have to loan them money,” he said.

Haven said the ticketing industry as a whole in the U.S. is extremely corrupt but that he's not surprised by the NCAA's latest apparent “scam.”

The NCAA allows corporations to buy up many of the good seats at sporting events before they are opened to the public, Haven said.

The NCAA's online ticketing screen for the men's and women's 2009 Final Four and Championship games are only for select sections in the uppermost regions of the arenas, according to the NCAA Web site.

“I like to believe the NCAA stands for No Chance At Admission,” Haven said.

The anonymous consumer wrote that he was able to get his $72 in service charges back from the NCAA by fighting through his credit card company. He said he will do the same thing this next year if his application is not selected.

“It's always good to have your credit card company between you and your vendor,” Haven said.

After two days of failed attempts to get any comment, NCAA representative Gail Dent finally returned numerous phone calls and promised three times to answer ConsumerAffairs.com's questions by this morning. She did not return two subsequent e-mails and the NCAA's PR office did not answer its phone this afternoon.

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