Most UCLA students have done their best to block out the memory of the Bruins’ last game at USC, a 66-19 blowout.
This year the most highly anticipated UCLA game of the season will only be seen in person by 1,727 UCLA students.
“We as a group at UCLA were surprised by the limited number we received for this game,” said Scott Mitchell, assistant athletic director at UCLA “We had hoped to receive more tickets.”
The number of tickets that UCLA receives for the game depends on many factors, including the success of the USC football team, the sale of USC season tickets and the number of tickets that USC thinks it can sell. All the decisions are made by the USC marketing department.
The same is true for UCLA, with all ticketing decisions coming from the school’s own marketing department.
When both USC and UCLA played in the Coliseum, the tickets were divided 50-50. Now UCLA has to make due with what it is given, and while Mitchell says they do push for more, there are a lot of people who want tickets.
Not only does UCLA have to worry about providing students with tickets, but also season-ticket holders, donors and the band. Luckily, USC was persuaded to give the school an additional 250 tickets for the band, a large number that would normally come out of the student ticket allotment.
Mitchell said that normally 10 percent of the total tickets go to the student body. With an allotment of only 14,067 total tickets from USC this year, that allocation does not leave many tickets for the students.
There were 5,834 students with Den season packages this year who opted to enter raffle. The decision to enter the raffle was decided when students bought or renewed their season packages last year. At that time they knew they were not guaranteed a ticket to the big game.
The marketing department decided that a “random draw lottery” would be the fairest method for ticket distribution.
Some students feel this is unjust and that tickets should have been distributed by seniority. Some also feel that the random draw might hurt the UCLA atmosphere at the game in the Coliseum, which has a capacity of 92,000 people.
“There is a fine line between making sure it is fair and making sure your school is well-represented at the game,” said Brian Gay, Den executive board member and treasurer .
Gay, a third-year communication studies student, said that at the last Den meeting, only four out of the approximately 25 students in attendance had received tickets.
“I see both sides but I really want a ticket,” Gay said. “I think people who have had full sports packages for a number of years, like those in the Den, should be rewarded for their continual loyalty to the team with a ticket to the game.”
With so few tickets given to UCLA as a whole, it is hard to reward everyone. In comparison, two years ago UCLA was given 20,100 tickets in total.
“From our perspective it is a huge drop,” said Dave Lowenstein, director of the Central Ticket Office. “At first we thought we would get more USC tickets, but in reality when it came time we received less than we thought.”
UCLA gave USC 28,000 tickets to last year’s game.
“We don’t make decisions ““ we are the facilitators,” Lowenstein said. “We are the guys that just make it work.”
While UCLA has no control over how many tickets it gets for away games, there is a guarantee next year that all students with Den season packages will have a ticket to the USC game at the Rose Bowl.
“If we had 10,000 students who wanted Den packages, we would make room for 10,000 students,” Lowenstein said.