UCLA Bruins: Currently the Hottest Tickets in College Football

Using TiqIQ's average prices, JJ Stankevitz over at NBC's College Football Talk has come up with a list of the 25 most expensive college football games this fall. 4 UCLA games are in this list including the most expensive ticket in all of college football (ht BrendonBruin):

1. Texas-UCLA (Arlington, Texas): $770/$144

11. UCLA-USC (Pasadena, Calif.): $422/$118

20. UCLA-Stanford (Pasadena, Calif.): $339/$88

24. UCLA-Oregon (Pasadena, Calif.): $317/$86

As Stankvitz notes, "the average price is the first number, and the cheapest ticket listed is the second."

So the Texas-UCLA game is even more expensive than Michigan-Ohio State (Columbus, OH), which is currently priced at $727/$372.  What to make of all of this?

It will be interesting to see exactly what portion of the revenues UCLA gets from that Texas game? Are we going to split the gate 50/50 with Texas, since according to Dan Guerrero and his Morgan Center officials this is a "neutral site" game? Or are we going to end up getting a smaller cut because excited Longhorn fans are going to fill up Jerry Dome in the hopes of Texas scoring a big win for their new head coach Charlie Strong against a pre-season contender from the Pac-12?

Clearly, based on the chart, Texas-UCLA is a great matchup for Austin fans, and they will pay up. So we did Guerrero give away a home and home, and take one game only in Texas? He screwed UCLA fans out of the chance for the same attractive matchup in the Rose Bowl, because well he is generally incompetent.

Also, there is another issue. If we expect high resale prices for the games against Southern Cal, Stanford and Oregon, what steps the geniuses in Morgan Center are going to take to ensure that UCLA fans are not tempted to sell their tickets to other fans to make few bucks? (See Wisconsin games at the Rose Bowl in 1994 and 1998). Our hope here that Coach Jim Mora will probably launch a public relations campaign on his own to make sure the Bruins have a full home advantage in those games, but then again it'd be unfair to expect him to do Guerrero's job all the time.

In any event, generally agree with Nick2002's instatake that given these process are subject to supply and demand, they indicate that people are "finally willing to pay to watch us play." After almost a decade of irrelevance dating back to the last years of Toledo and the nightmarish years of Dorrell and Neuheisel, this is indeed a "compliment" for Mora's program in Westwood. Now the question is whether Mora can capitalize on these opportunities by delivering a monster season.

GO BRUINS.