Kudos to athletics for securing freshmen crowd

What a welcome sight.

The student section at the football game against San Diego State
turned into one big blob of blue and gold Saturday.

A nearly chock-full blob of blue and gold.

It was nice for a change to see a really crowded section that
normally has a few noticeable patches of empty seats. Seats made
open by years of disappointment caused by a losing team.

But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why, for the
first game of the school year, so many students would flock to
Pasadena. To a non-conference, low-stakes game, no less.

Maybe it was the dearth of collegiate athletics over the summer
that led them to get their yearly fix of Bruin sports before the
year’s newness wears off to uncover the agony of defeat known
all too well by those who’ve been here awhile.

It could have been an overwhelming need for first-years to show
the school spirit that’s been bottled up since March’s
acceptance letters came in the mail.

Or perhaps the free tickets for freshmen had something to do
with it.

I don’t know. Just a guess.

Think about it. A stadium that holds over 90,000 had some 40,000
public seats unsold for the Bruins-Aztecs matchup. Yet the student
section was as full as I’ve ever seen it for a game like this
one.

And I’m sure some of the credit for this has to go to the
genius who decided to give freshmen free entry into the game.

Sure, the athletic department loses eight bucks a pop for each
of our wardrobe-minding, soon-to-be-15-pounds-heavier,
studying-preoccupied-because-they-think-they’re-going-to-get-all-Fs
friends who stepped foot onto campus last week.

But the benefits sure to be reaped from what seems like such a
friendly gesture can hardly be measured.

For the price of a hot dog and soda at the Rose Bowl, the
athletic department gets a new customer base ““ a few thousand
more students who likely will fork over their lunch money a few
times in the coming year to see Maurice Drew work his magic in
Pasadena or the men’s basketball team in action at Pauley
Pavilion.

And, hey, if a third of those students buys a $4 frozen
lemonade, the concessions workers could take a trip to Hawaii for a
couple weeks and still have a little money left over for a souvenir
coconut or two.

Plus you can’t ignore that the game chosen for this
promotion was in the early part of the season, in which the
football team historically has won ““ the time before the
Bruins take on Cal, Oregon and USC. Ensuring that the newbies get a
false sense of victory so that they’ll come back for more
““ that’s priceless.

Still, I wonder if it would have been so hard to let all
students go to the game for free. Athletics could have built up its
clientele even more by filling seats with butts of people who
ordinarily wouldn’t go to a game because of the $8 price.

Or the department could have won over the apathetic ones who
don’t care either way about going to a game: Free stuff does
a lot to change people’s minds.

But maybe I’m just bitter because I never got a free
ticket when I was a freshman. Or a second-year. And, oh, wait for
it ““ not this year either.

Though I can’t really blame the athletic department. What
it did makes sense. Treat the freshmen to a game that the Bruins
are favored to win so, in return, it gets a bunch of students to
catch the bug of school spirit and carry that into adulthood when
they just might buy season tickets and donate money to sports
programs.

Seems like a pretty good deal for an eight-dollar
investment.

Looper doesn’t want to admit he’s jealous of
first-years. E-mail him at [email protected].