Redskins Waiting List Totally Gone to Hell? Are Blackouts Coming to a TV Near You? was originally published on City Desk on Apr. 29, 2009, at 2:41 pm
I wrote this week about the history of the Redskins waiting list and its apparent descent into bogosity.
I sensed things were bad over at the team’s ticket office.
Turns out they’re worse.
Dan Snyder claims in interviews there are “over 200,000″ folks waiting for season tickets.
Oh, really?
CITY PAPER HAS OBTAINED a piece of direct mail that the Redskins sent out a few days ago. The document offers recipients the chance to buy “up to eight (8)” season tickets and parking passes for the 2009 season.
Sports
“I have no idea why we got this,” said a recipient of the offer, which was addressed to a generic official of the organization he works for. “Nobody here ever signed up for the waiting list. They even misspelled our name.”
(The recipient requested anonymity for him and his organization. I checked to see that the account name and password provided on the mailer do in fact work on the Redskins’ Web site, meaning barring some hacking or an elaborate scam the offer to buy tickets is legitimate.)
And the seats being hawked here aren’t the silly priced club or suite seats at FedExField, which have never sold out since the stadium opened, despite the Redskins’ claims otherwise.
No, this mailer is for the run-of-the-mill general admission tickets. The tickets Snyder, who made his money in direct mail before buying the Skins, tells us “over 200,000″ people are waiting for.
In other words: This looks like the most desperate measure the team has ever made to dump tickets, and sure makes it look like whatever waiting list there once was has been reduced to nothing. (If even ONE person was still on the list who actually wanted to buy Redskins tickets, why would the team bother offering tickets to random folks not on it?)
The desperation is such that anybody who buys tickets “by May 15, 2009″ also gets “a $25 Redskins Retail Store Gift Card.”
The letter is jam-packed with laugh-out-loud lines.
Among them:
“Resell your tickets at a profit via StubHub for any game you are unable to attend!”
“Quantities are limited.” And,
“Don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity!”
So, NFL: Are you going to enforce the ballyhooed blackout rule if Snyder’s latest direct mail campaign doesn’t fill his stadium?
