Williams: Preseason games are marketing nightmare

$3.50.

16,000 tickets unused.

Those numbers are a marketer’s nightmare.

And since no professional sports league is better at marketing its product than the National Football League, it makes me wonder whether the league will take any action to clean up the mess it’s created with meaningless preseason games.

Once upon a time, NFL preseason games were interesting as hopefuls battled established starters for coveted jobs. But in the past 10 years, NFL head coaches have decided that preventing injuries to key personnel is more important.

You can’t blame them for putting job security ahead of uncovering a gold nugget that’s been overlooked by so many. The players are paid way-too-much to risk injuries when it doesn’t count. Coaching tenures often don’t exceed two seasons.

The victims in this new philosophy are the paying customers. Sometimes, it surprises me how poorly the NFL treats its most dedicated fans. Not only do most season ticket-holders have to purchase personal seat licenses for thousands of dollars, but their annual package includes preseason games.

To their credit, the Pittsburgh Steelers this season cut the preseason price and made up for the difference by increasing the price of two regular-season games. That’s a good start.

NFL fans are not idiots, at least when it comes to cash. The preseason games have devolved so much that fans can’t give away tickets. Starters rarely play, and when they do, the schemes are so vanilla so no one will give away any of their Week 1 secrets.

It’s a marketing nightmare, especially because we still watch.

Last week, the Cleveland Browns hosted the Chicago Bears in the preseason finale at FirstEnergy Stadium. Before the game, the website StubHub! was offering seats for $3.50.

The same night in Pittsburgh, the attendance was approximately 44,000 for the Steelers-Carolina Panthers scrimmage at Heinz Field. That means that approximately 16,000 tickets purchased through season-ticket plans went unused. StubHub! offered tickets for as low as $10.

How do you market that?

The idea should be to get fans into the stadium where they buy $10 beers and $6 soft drinks and $12 deluxe hamburgers.

Charging less for preseason games and offsetting the loss with higher prices for the real games may not be the solution. But it’s better than sticking it to your best customers.

After watching seven of the Browns and Steelers preseason games, I don’t know any more about those teams than before training camps opened.

One time, the Steelers’ starting offense looked tremendous. That was in the first 20 minutes of the second preseason game against the Buffalo Bills. Ben Roethlisberger hooked up for touchdown passes to Antonio Brown and Markus Wheaton, and the Steelers looked like last year’s team that went 6-2 down the stretch.

A week later, the Steelers were in Philadelphia and the starters looked worse against the Eagles than last year’s squad that started out 2-6.

Which team will show up Sunday against the Browns?

Neither Brian Hoyer nor Johnny Manziel look to be on the verge of becoming the elite quarterback Cleveland desperately craves. Then again, they were playing in meaningless scrimmages, sometimes with second-string hopefuls.

As the regular season approaches, about the only thing I’m sure of is that the Steelers won’t repeat last year’s 0-4 start.

Maybe Hoyer and Manziel are about to surprise me.

Tom Williams is a sportswriter at The Vindicator. Write him at williams@vindy.com and follow him on Twitter, @Williams_Vindy.