Lions guarantee win over ‘Riders Sunday

[Toppy Vann]

For those who are upset about the Win Guarantee and felt it was a motivational tool for the Riders, ask yourself which of the following had the greatest impact on player motivation:

A) Earlier in the season the Lions go into Regina and lay a beating on the Riders, with Andrew Harris running wild and Riders tackling like they were in high school. After the game the embarrassed players have a players only meeting to iron things out.

OR

B) the President of the Lions (not the HC, GM, or players) responds to the Rider billboard outside BC Place by promising to issuing a ticket to another home game if the Lions don't win.

The above is pretty much a rhetorical question that does not need responding to. But feel free.

It's not an either/or and it's not actually even a rhetorical question. The logic here is faulty.

Of course ANY team pro or amateur is going to remember the prior beating and not want that again. These guys are pros.

This is how the Riders viewed it on top of the motivation these same pros have to play well and win as they need points. The Riders as Foley says know they are last year's Grey Cup CFL champions.

I think the Riders took it as a sign of disrespecting their championship status and pretty much amateurish from a marketing perspective. It is akin to a Hail Mary. Now what do they do if they can't right this thing and actually win games. The GC game this year looms as the next botch up for them as the storyline will go from this week's "Broken Promise" to Lions are a lock to not be in this year's GC game even if they go cross over and win there.

As quoted from Ricky Foley down below "It wasn't a good idea." That is one of the best summation quotes out of all the media stories I have read or TV discussion so far.

Saskatchewan Roughriders quarterback Darian Durant, who ended up playing a limited role in the drama, sat in his locker stall with a satisfied smile on his face. Behind him was a Xeroxed picture of B.C. Lions president Dennis Skulsky and his now famous — for all the wrong reasons — quote: “We’re gonna go and win and we’re guaranteeing it.”

http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Saska ... ederated=1

Just so you know, that wasn’t the only copy of the Skulsky declaration in the Riders locker-room on Sunday or the only opinion about its wisdom.

“We’re the champs, man,” said Riders defensive end Ricky Foley. “We put in a lot of work and effort and we don’t appreciate being disrespected. It’s a long season but this is a big one.

“It wasn’t a good idea.”

But it seemed to work for the Riders.

Durant was asked if his team drew motivation from Skulsky’s guarantee.

“Of course,” Durant said. “Any time someone is bold enough to make that statement, we take that as disrespect. Honestly. We know he has confidence in his team and that’s one thing. But, at the end of the day, we take that to heart.”

[DanoT]

For those who are upset about the Win Guarantee and felt it was a motivational tool for the Riders, ask yourself which of the following had the greatest impact on player motivation:

A) Earlier in the season the Lions go into Regina and lay a beating on the Riders, with Andrew Harris running wild and Riders tackling like they were in high school. After the game the embarrassed players have a players only meeting to iron things out.

OR

B) the President of the Lions (not the HC, GM, or players) responds to the Rider billboard outside BC Place by promising to issuing a ticket to another home game if the Lions don't win.

The above is pretty much a rhetorical question that does not need responding to. But feel free.

It's not an either/or and it's not actually even a rhetorical question. The logic here is faulty.

Of course ANY team pro or amateur is going to remember the prior beating and not want that again. These guys are pros.

This is how the Riders viewed it on top of the motivation these same pros have to play well and win as they need points. The Riders as Foley says know they are last year's Grey Cup CFL champions.

I think the Riders took it as a sign of disrespecting their championship status and pretty much amateurish from a marketing perspective. It is akin to a Hail Mary. Now what do they do if they can't right this thing and actually win games. The GC game this year looms as the next botch up for them as the storyline will go from this week's "Broken Promise" to Lions are a lock to not be in this year's GC game even if they go cross over and win there.

As quoted from Ricky Foley down below "It wasn't a good idea." That is one of the best summation quotes out of all the media stories I have read or TV discussion so far.

Saskatchewan Roughriders quarterback Darian Durant, who ended up playing a limited role in the drama, sat in his locker stall with a satisfied smile on his face. Behind him was a Xeroxed picture of B.C. Lions president Dennis Skulsky and his now famous — for all the wrong reasons — quote: “We’re gonna go and win and we’re guaranteeing it.”

http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Saska ... ederated=1

Just so you know, that wasn’t the only copy of the Skulsky declaration in the Riders locker-room on Sunday or the only opinion about its wisdom.

“We’re the champs, man,” said Riders defensive end Ricky Foley. “We put in a lot of work and effort and we don’t appreciate being disrespected. It’s a long season but this is a big one.

“It wasn’t a good idea.”

But it seemed to work for the Riders.

Durant was asked if his team drew motivation from Skulsky’s guarantee.

“Of course,” Durant said. “Any time someone is bold enough to make that statement, we take that as disrespect. Honestly. We know he has confidence in his team and that’s one thing. But, at the end of the day, we take that to heart.”

I wouldn't expect the Riders to say anything other than what they have said. But really GWN or no GWN it was not the determining factor in the outcome of the game or anything close to it.

[TheLionKing]

Just emailed by Customer Representative asking if I can get a discount on my next year's season tickets in lieu of the free tickets. Will let you know what happens.

Here's the response I got back from the Lions:

"Unfortunately we're not able to do that as there's a hard cost involved, we're able to do the complimentary tickets as it's simply giving a seat with no hard cost associated"

[WestCoastJoe]

So Skulsky makes the guarantee. And fans sitting in the stands have mixed feelings. They want the Lions to win, but, they might not mind those free tickets if the Riders win. And what they got from the Lions was less motivation than the Riders had.

The Riders took Skulsky's statement to heart. There were posters with a picture of Skulsky and the phrase "We're gonna go win and we're guaranteeing it.''

"In all of our hearts, in all of our heads, in all of our bodies and in all of our muscles we wanted to prove them wrong,'' said running back Anthony Allen, whose power running in the fourth quarter clinched Saskatchewan's fifth straight victory. -- McCormick in the Leader-Post

Kind of a back assed way to promote your team, it seems to me. Fire up the opposition. Put pressure on your own team. Give the fans mixed feelings. Have some fans actually hoping for a Lions' loss. It almost seems like a desperate attempt to build a crowd.

And it is one of those things where it better work. If it fails, it is egg on the face. If it works, it is genius.

So it puts some more butts in the seats at a future game. Do the Lions get revenue from concessions?

I had no strong reaction for or against the "guarantee" prior to the game. At this time I kind of think it was a dud. For example, if we won, it could conceivably be tried again. And other teams somewhere, trying to build the fan base, might try it. Will there be that effect now? I doubt it. I expect most will view it as a failure, on many levels.

It is not a "hard cost" to the Lions. They give out free tickets to fans who would otherwise not go to the game. Not quite like money out of the pocket to pay the rent.

Just IMO ...

[Toppy Vann]

Actually it does lead to actual costs - more fans mean more security and stadium staff which will have to be picked up by the Lions. There is a raft of costs handling tickets and I'm not sure if TicketMaster is an issue for them either.

Those extra costs are what the Whitecaps avoid by restricting seating and not opening up for big games and not knowing those relatively "fixed" costs to stage a game. This also allows them to increase prices per ticket as it is a more scarce item than it'd be if they open up the place when a big team comes to town. The issue is that they must notify the staff to come in and when they don't know the numbers they can't estimate right.

If anyone thought that the guaranteed win was a brilliant idea you need only read Ed Willes today. Astute business people think ahead to the implications of something like this and reject it as a loss is huge and a GWN can motivate opponents. Anyone who thinks the Riders are just saying it provided more motive to play well is dreaming. Even Chamblin said it was a factor for him and the coaches in their preparation.

This is ugly folks - not the story they needed. It should have been foreseen. It won't go away all season now. It will be constantly referred to for some time to come.

Once the media start a new storyline like this one below - it might be a one week news cycle story - or it might catch fire and harm their brand short term. It has highlited the falling fan base and is being compared to Ackles and Buono and Skulsky and Benevides could be sinking together.

http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Wille ... ederated=1

But let’s look at it another way.
You have to admit, it’s a loose interpretation of the term genius.

But there’s a larger issue involved here, one that speaks to the state of the Lions. Until this year, the franchise never needed a guaranteed win to sell its product. Under Bob Ackles and Wally Buono, the Lions brand was built through a series of successful, exciting teams that earned the support of the community. There was no need for gimmicks, no need for hype. People invested in the team because they knew they’d be entertained.

Now? Since, moving into B.C. Place in 2011, attendance has decreased every year and, barring a miracle over their final four home dates, it will fall again this season. Against that backdrop, Skulsky made a grandstand play in an attempt to raise the Lions’ profile.

Time will offer a more complete accounting of its success but, in the here and now, it feels like something has happened between this team and its fan base. The real job before the Lions is rebuilding that relationship, and if they’re wondering how, they can go back to 2003 when Ackles and Buono first joined forces.

[David]

Some may still view this promotion as a game-changer, and that's fair. But I viewed it as a bad idea from the outset and predicted this would happen; that the Lions would lose the game, not get jaw-dropping attendance (although 33K was frankly, a little more than I expected and not a terrible turnout on a Sunday afternoon) and that Ed Willes would be critical of the organization for this stunt. I could almost have written his column for him, word-for-word.

Still, to suggest that there's something wrong with the team's relationship to its fan base is not entirely accurate. You can't ignore 1.026MM viewers in the summer. Nor can you ignore being the most watched team on TSN 8 out of 9 weeks, robust merchandise sales etc. The fans are there. They're just consuming the product differently.


DH

[B.C.FAN]

The guarantee gave the Riders some extra motivation to win the physical battles but from a marketing standpoint it was genius. People were talking about the Lions in the days leading up the game and afterwards, and they're interested in redeeming their extra tickets. There's no hard cost to the team, just some potential lost sales. Many people who get free tickets may be new casual fans who would not have bought tickets to another game this year. Some may still buy tickets for one or more games in addition to the one they get for free. If all tickets are redeemed, it will mean an average of about 8,000 free tickets for each of the four remaining games. The Lions will get an attendance boost, and create more buzz.

[sj-roc]

Sorry but I gotta take exception to Ed Willes's comment that "There was no need for gimmicks, no need for hype" in years past.

There was TONS of that. Remember lunch box night? Comped copies of The Waterboy? Framed team photos? A free scarf for renewing your STs? If these weren't gimmicks then what were they? And if there was no need for them, then why did they bother?

And what about how we'd often get regular updates on ticket sales, especially for WF games but also even for key regular season games where extra seats would be opened up to meet demand? Again, if that's not hype then what is it?

I've lived in this market for nearly 20 years now and I remember a time, back in 1996-2002 when there was little to none of this hype and gimmickry. A stretch of 63 regular season home games where we drew 20k+ to barely half the games, breached 25k a whopping SEVEN times (one of these was the heavily papered opener of the disastrous 1996 season), and topped 30k ONCE, and this was for Lui Passaglia's final game (yeah, no hype or gimmickry there).

EW is so out to lunch with that comment he makes Kobayashi and Joey Chestnut look like hunger strikers.

[South Pender]

There's no hard cost to the team, just some potential lost sales.

Please excuse me if I don't get this, but aren't lost sales a cost to the team? (I guess I don't know the difference between a "hard" cost and just a cost.) If even half of the 33K would have reached into their pockets for the $50 (say) to attend another game but now will not have to, hasn't this hurt the team substantially?

[sj-roc]

Some may still view this promotion as a game-changer, and that's fair. But I viewed it as a bad idea from the outset and predicted this would happen; that the Lions would lose the game, not get jaw-dropping attendance (although 33K was frankly, a little more than I expected and not a terrible turnout on a Sunday afternoon) and that Ed Willes would be critical of the organization for this stunt. I could almost have written his column for him, word-for-word.

Still, to suggest that there's something wrong with the team's relationship to its fan base is not entirely accurate. You can't ignore 1.026MM viewers in the summer. Nor can you ignore being the most watched team on TSN 8 out of 9 weeks, robust merchandise sales etc. The fans are there. They're just consuming the product differently.


DH

Willes seems to be ignoring the damping effect on attendance by hi-def television, which is something Ackles didn't have to worry about (at least not as much as DS today) as he went about rebuilding the fan base. It's a problem that won't be easy to solve unless and until hi-def can support local blackouts. Key to the solution will be offering a gameday experience that can't be delivered on hi-def. Willes doesn't seem to understand this.

The other part of the problem is perception/expectation. When you consider there are several venues in this league that don't even *have* 33k capacity (not even close in a few cases) Sunday's crowd shouldn't be viewed in the big picture as underwhelming. But that perception is out there for some observers and it's one that's largely shaped by the 54k+ (59k+ when it first opened) capacity of our venue — an amount we never really needed in the first place considering that (a) only once in the final 17 seasons at Empire did average annual attendance exceed 30k (which was in 1970, long before vacating) and (b) Empire's capacity was reduced nearly 10% almost a decade before moving out and it never really put the Lions in a position of turning fans away.

[Hambone]

There's no hard cost to the team, just some potential lost sales.

Please excuse me if I don't get this, but aren't lost sales a cost to the team? (I guess I don't know the difference between a "hard" cost and just a cost.) If even half of the 33K would have reached into their pockets for the $50 (say) to attend another game but now will not have to, hasn't this hurt the team substantially?

That's just it though. The only thing that is lost is the portion of the crowd that was contemplating taking in a future game but had not yet committed to buying a ticket. What's the season ticket base? 15000? 18000? Deduct them from the 33K. How many Rider fans crawled out of the woodwork to attend them game? 4000? How many of them had a future Lions game on their agenda? Maybe 10% of whatever number it was scattered across the 4 games? Deduct them from the portion left over after the ST holders have been removed from the equation. How many people who have planned to take in future games already had bought tickets for whatever games they planned on seeing? I think you're looking at roughly 10K as being the maximum number of potential "lost sales" and that's assuming just about 100% of those who were in attendance and hadn't made a commitment to a future game take advantage of the guarantee. And from that number you have to deduct the number of tickets attributable to the guarantee. The net effect of the various dynamics I think gets things down to maybe 7K in potential lost revenue assuming people really do pick up on the guarantee. Even myself as a ST holder of a single seat I don't know whether I'll pick up the option. The seat directly in front of me is not held by a ST holder. I'd probably grab that one if I can otherwise there isn't much reason unless I turn around and donate the ticket back through the Kids Up Front thing although I'm not sure if a single ticket for that program helps much.

[Toppy Vann]

Marketing people - if you have any that know how marketing works - anticipate how these things get spun in the media - the Lions didn't.

It doesn't matter if true or not -if they say it in the papers and media pick up the theme -it can become self fulfilling as well as mainstream thinking such as the NFL is better than the CFL stuff that keeps getting said by people who don't like the CFL but all things NFL they worship.

Hard costs here include security and cleaning - extras that have been brought in.
If Ticketmaster issue tickets they too will get paid.


"In case you're wondering if the #Riders were motivated by the guarantee, this was in all their lockers: #CFL pic.twitter.com/FUbM8mxr4U"

[B.C.FAN]

There's no hard cost to the team, just some potential lost sales.

Please excuse me if I don't get this, but aren't lost sales a cost to the team? (I guess I don't know the difference between a "hard" cost and just a cost.) If even half of the 33K would have reached into their pockets for the $50 (say) to attend another game but now will not have to, hasn't this hurt the team substantially?

That's just it though. The only thing that is lost is the portion of the crowd that was contemplating taking in a future game but had not yet committed to buying a ticket. What's the season ticket base? 15000? 18000? Deduct them from the 33K. How many Rider fans crawled out of the woodwork to attend them game? 4000? How many of them had a future Lions game on their agenda? Maybe 10% of whatever number it was scattered across the 4 game
s? Deduct them from the portion left over after the ST holders have been removed from the equation. How many people who have planned to take in future games already had bought tickets for whatever games they planned on seeing? I think you're looking at roughly 10K as being the maximum number of potential "lost sales" and that's assuming just about 100% of those who were in attendance and hadn't made a commitment to a future game take advantage of the guarantee. And from that number you have to deduct the number of tickets attributable to the guarantee. The net effect of the various dynamics I think gets things down to maybe 7K in potential lost revenue assuming people really do pick up on the guarantee. Even myself as a ST holder of a single seat I don't know whether I'll pick up the option. The seat directly in front of me is not held by a ST holder. I'd probably grab that one if I can otherwise there isn't much reason unless I turn around and donate the ticket back through the Kids Up Front thing although I'm not sure if a single ticket for that program helps much.

Well said. I'll take my three free tickets and give them to people I know who would not have bought their own tickets. I think the estimate of 7,000 potential lost sales might be high. Some single-game ticket holders who were planning to buy tickets to a future game may still do so in addition to the one game they'll get for free. The extra fans will create more buzz in the stadium, which could lure more people to come back. And unless extra sections of the stadium are opened, there's little in the way of extra game-day costs to the team. It's a guaranteed win as a marketing strategy, even though the team didn't win on the field.

[Toppy Vann]

Good idea or not there are added costs for the stadium staff - these costs are borne by the Lions. These are indisputable facts if anyone here has booked BC Place as has my former firm or if you have read any of the Whitecaps rationale for their approach.

Extra costs are in part why the Whitecaps took their approach to force fans to buy seasons or take a huge chance they'll miss the big teams and games as they won't open more seats.

At one point the Lions President trotted this idea but now seems to have backed off. Vancouver historically has always been considered a big "walk up" gate city that leaves teams not sure of the fans and extra costs cut into very tight profit margins that are made worse if your team is not winning.

If you think you are getting 40,000 or 35,000 but get less there are added costs that cut into the profit.

[sj-roc]

Good idea or not there are added costs for the stadium staff - these costs are borne by the Lions. These are indisputable facts if anyone here has booked BC Place as has my former firm or if you have read any of the Whitecaps rationale for their approach.

Extra costs are in part why the Whitecaps took their approach to force fans to buy seasons or take a huge chance they'll miss the big teams and games as they won't open more seats.

At one point the Lions President trotted this idea but now seems to have backed off. Vancouver historically has always been considered a big "walk up" gate city that leaves teams not sure of the fans and extra costs cut into very tight profit margins that are made worse if your team is not winning.

If you think you are getting 40,000 or 35,000 but get less there are added costs that cut into the profit.

I wouldn't think there would be added security or food service staff costs for the Lions unless they are forced to open extra sections to accommodate the comps (has Skulsky made it clear that they actually will expand to do this if needed or will comps be subject to availability within the current capacity of 32k [27k lower bowl + 5k upper deck, Lions' bench side]?). With attendance trending down from 2013's average of 28,311 (only 27,186 if you exclude the Riders' visit) then it's not (yet) a given they will even need to open extra sections. The average through the first five games of 2014 is 26,468, down 4.4% from last year's figure of exactly 27,700, especially unfavourable considering the latter figure doesn't include a Riders' visit. The average over our last four games last year, including the 37k for the Riders' visit was 29,075. Notwithstanding the comps, and with no Rider visit to pad this year's average, this figure will probably also drop.

It will be interesting to see if one of the four remaining games has a much higher attendance than the rest; if so then this might be read as people overwhelmingly choosing this game to cash in their comps (I'm thinking the finale vs Cgy on Fri Nov 7 would be the one, with Wpg on Sat Sep 13 being the second most likely possibility) and might give some indication of the redemption rate, which I'm thinking is not going to approach 100%.