Mark Ingram Talks Protective Stadium, Inferno Podcast in Radio Appearance

The UAB AD took to Tony Kurre's radio show to talk about stadium pricing and preview an upcoming podcast featuring Trent Dilfer and Andy Kennedy.

Mark Ingram made his weekly appearance on Tony Kurre’s radio show last Thursday, discussing upcoming changes at Protective, stadium pricing, NIL locker room dynamics, and the Inferno podcast. His most relevant comments are highlighted below.

On upcoming promotions and changes at Protective:

We always do a Salute to Service game as close to Veteran’s Day as it can be, and then we always have the Children’s Harbor game. We also started last year a similar event with Smile-A-Mile, which is another organization that works with families whose kids are staying at Children’s Hospital, but it’s more of a family support group that’s really magnificent. This is really just to try and be good community partners and good citizens. It also promotes these great organizations and the work they’re doing…

In terms of change, you're going to see us move the student tailgate this year to a new location. For the general fanbase, you may say that's not necessarily a benefit, but I think it will be. Based on the location, I think it'll help create a festival feel and improved atmosphere for everybody passing by. Our students have been very active and that's been good, but they've been in a location that most fans would never see them. It’s convenient for the students but it's kind of off the beaten path a little bit, so we're going to move them into a more central spot…

I'm working with the BJCC staff on that new location. Again, I just think it'll be fun for all of our fans.

On rising stadium and ticket prices:

People want to support their team, their school, their community team as best they can until they can't. Will it cap out? I guess the market will determine that and the fanbase will determine that…

But I do think that you've got to be sensitive to it. We are very sensitive to that. We want to be, again, good for the community and be something that people can afford to go to inexpensively.

But at the same time, I have expenses that are increasing that are not my fault, right? It costs more to take our team on a bus to play somewhere because of the cost of gasoline. So the bus company's got to charge me more. So I’ve got to figure out a way to get more. And you say, well, just sell more tickets. Well, we've always been trying to sell more tickets.

So you've got to figure out a way to stay balanced there, to increase when it's appropriate and by a number that's sensible. We can't start charging the same as whatever the Dallas Cowboys charge and go, look, the Cowboys charge that. That’s not reasonable, but we have to pay attention to it.

Our pricing is some of the lowest in our league by design. It may stay that way. It may not. We're always evaluating. And I don't say that to say there's a pending increase. But just like any business, we've always got to evaluate our price model.

On the dynamics NIL has created:

Professional sports are profitable, while very few of us are. We generate revenue, but we don’t generate a profit. Most [athletic] departments around the country are underwater. There's probably 20 — maybe not even 20 — Division 1 FBS programs that operate in the black without help from their university. So the universities, through student fees or some other means, will subsidize their department to help fund the operations. But there's less than 20 to do it without help…

And look, I think that I love our model, that we give access to education through sport. That's been a great model for a long, long time, which clearly we’ve gotten away from. I've heard other ADs and coaches talk about how they'll bring a freshman in, and to get that freshman, they had to pay all this money, and their senior doesn't make as much money. The senior is the starter and making less money than the freshman who doesn't play.

And they can pay the freshman to get the freshman, hoping that the freshman will work out. Well, I hope it works out too before the freshman decides to transfer out next year.

But you can imagine what the dynamics are in a meeting room. Let’s just say, [there are] five quarterbacks and the freshman who doesn't play is making more money than everybody else combined because he was so highly rated coming out of high school.

I've heard stories about these arguments, these near-fights, that have occurred in these meeting rooms. You're talking about 18-year-old to 22-year-old kids who are not in a position yet to handle that in a mature way. So it's really changed the locker room for a lot of places.

On The Inferno, an upcoming podcast with Ingram, Kurre, Andy Kennedy, and Trent Dilfer that will benefit UAB’s NIL collective:

I want to be clear: it will be free to the listener. There’s no cost, there’s no paywall or anything like that. The more people we have, though, the more attractive is to advertisers. Those advertisers are going to be supporting our collective by helping to support the show…

That's where we need your help and where we want you to spread it around to your friends and get people to listen because it does make a difference…

I've been limited in what I'm allowed by rule to do until recently, so now I can become more engaged in that. It's been such a challenging hands-off process for every athletic department in the country. In some places, they'll have a former player or a local businessperson that's got the time and desire to do it, but those are really few and far between, to be candid. Even some of the best programs in the country have struggled. Finding that right person is hard…

We’ll see this as an initiative from our department more than ever to help us fund the collective so we can ensure that our coaches have the best players. If you’re a season ticket holder, you want to see a good team, right? We have to make sure that the team on the floor, on the field, et cetera, is one you are excited to watch.

These dollars [will go to the collective] amongst many other programs that we're putting together to fund it.