On a warm, sunny and perfect day to watch a football game, an estimated 4,000 University of Minnesota students chose not to use their tickets to see the Gophers and Illinois last Saturday. The University athletic department sold almost 11,000 student tickets for the season but at least 4,000 students chose not to show up despite the beautiful day and the Gophers having won an exciting game the previous Saturday against Michigan State.
The student section at the bowl end of TCF Bank Stadium has consistently had open seats during all six home games but Saturday was the lowest turnout. A new outdoor, on-campus stadium with a team striving to qualify for a bowl game apparently isn’t enough to send nearly all the student ticket holders to games.
State legislation that approved funding for the stadium requires the University to set aside 20 percent of the seats for students. With a capacity of 50,805, the students are entitled to over 10,000 seats. If all the seats are not sold as season tickets in a given year, then students have priority on buying remaining tickets from the allotment as single game tickets. Those tickets have to be purchased up to one week before a game, a Gophers spokesman told Sports Headliners.
Students, who this year paid a bargain rate of $77 for seven home games, will be entitled to even more seats using the 20 percent formula if the stadium is ever expanded. That could be interesting, even though the University’s Minneapolis-St. Paul campus is one of the nation’s largest with a student enrollment of about 50,000.
The athletic department needs to look at ideas regarding student use of tickets. Convincing Gopher youth to attend the games might be impossible, but by combining student and public sales perhaps selling more tickets than there are seats is an answer.
And a parting thought about last Saturday: nowhere in the stadium were the boos louder than from the student section during the first half. Quarterback Adam Weber and the Gophers offense received the loudest chorus of boos in memory at a University home game. That is disappointing because Weber, who did have a poor first half throwing the ball, is a 22-year-old student-athlete doing the best work he can and usually is the top performer on the offense.
Did any of the boo-birds stop to think that their actions could make things worse for Weber and the Gophers?