IU football coach Curt Cignetti: ‘We’ve got a chance to be as good as we want to be’
Indiana football coach Curt Cignetti shares his overall impressions of the team’s performance during spring practice.
- IU incorporated personal seat donations, but that hasn’t slowed the buying of season tickets or mini plans.
BLOOMINGTON — Indiana football rolled out a plan for 2025 single-game ticket sales this month that’s slightly different from what it was a year ago, but for good reason.
The Hoosiers will play seven games at Memorial Stadium, including four conference opponents: Illinois (Sept. 20), Michigan State (Oct. 18), UCLA (Oct. 25), and Wisconsin (Nov. 15).
Indiana staggered the availability of single-game tickets by opening up a pre-sale to donors June 10 and a “build-your-own” two-game bundle for non-donors that includes one nonconference and one Big Ten game.
The program will make the remaining individual game tickets available to the general public July 8, nearly a full month after it opened sales for single-game tickets for the 2024 season.
Indiana tweaked the schedule due to increased season-ticket sales following the team’s first appearance in the College Football Playoff under coach Curt Cignetti.
“Ticket sales have been phenomenal,” Indiana athletic director Scott Dolson said in an interview with The Herald-Times. “Best I’ve seen in my long history, in terms of year-to-year improvement.”
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“Pack the Rock” movement showing no signs of slowing down
Going into 2024, Indiana football’s ticket sales were up 10% in most categories, and Dolson was happy with those numbers, considering the Hoosiers were coming off a third straight disappointing season.
The expectations changed amidst IU’s historic 10-0 start.
There was a stretch early in the year when Cignetti made the atmosphere at Memorial Stadium a weekly talking point. He urged fans to “Pack the Rock” and penned a letter to students encouraging them to stay for all four quarters in hopes of creating a more imposing home environment.
Indiana fans responded by setting a single-season attendance record (386,992) that included four straight sellouts (53,082) to end the year.
That momentum carried into the offseason.
“We will definitely have sellouts,” Dolson said. “I don’t know if we will have sellouts for every game. I think we will be close, maybe closer than we’ve ever been in our history. There’s no question that Hoosier Nation has responded just how we hoped they would.”
Indiana football games becoming a hot-ticket item after CFP appearance
Indiana’s season-ticket sales are up 50% from last season, Dolson said. They were in the low 20s last season and are up in the mid 30s as the program prepares to open up single-game ticket sales.
“It’s remarkable, even anecdotally, people saying to me they are legitimately worried about not being able to get a ticket,” Dolson said. “That’s what you want, to create enough demand where people worry about the supply. People are starting to worry about supply, and that’s a good thing.”
Explainer: Indiana football incorporates personal seat donations in 2025. Here’s what it means
The improved sales came after IU introduced a personal seat donation (PSD) program in February that raised season-ticket prices upwards of $250 per seat. The program is expected to generate $2.5 to $3 million in annual revenue as the athletic department looks for ways to cover revenue-sharing expenses.
“The personal seat donation, people understood,” Dolson said. “It’s never easy to increase prices and we’ve always tried to keep (ticket prices) modest and at market value. I do think people see the investments we are making and appreciate the results of those investments.”
Indiana’s biggest challenge in recent months has been figuring out the optimal number of individual tickets to make available.
“We still want to maintain single-game opportunities because not everyone can come for a full season, and with an alumni base that’s one of the largest in the country, we want to accommodate as many people as we can, but what’s the right number?” Dolson said. “But those are awesome problems to have when you’ve been around a long time and had to find extremely creative ways (in the past) to generate the interest we want.”
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Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
