Hot days at the Central Ticket Office

At the height of the Bob Toledo Era, UCLA sold about 37,000 season tickets for football.

Last year, coming off a 10-2 season with more miracles than an entire season at Lourdes, the Bruins sold 43,000, including students and faculty seating. "We renewed those seats at about a 90% clip," said UCLA Director of Marketing Scott Mitchell, "which is historically high for us.

"But we’re on a pace now – comparing week-against-week sales from a year ago – of about 6,500 tickets ahead at this date. So we could be at 50,000 season tickets or beyond and that’s our goal."

That would be an all-time record for UCLA and a sure sign of what fans expect from the Bruins this coming season on the field.

"The Notre Dame game has had a lot to do with it," noted Mitchell. "We’ve used that game to try and expand our reach into the community. And the success of the UCLA basketball team has helped and even USC’s success [in football] has helped."

With regard to USC, Mitchell pointed out that as ticket availability for USC games has dried up almost completely, fans who want to see college football have an outlet: UCLA. And – like the Notre Dame game this season – tickets for the USC game will be part of packages in the future.

Comments

[MIMBruin]

Do you know if there's been any consideration as to whether the season ticket sales are in any way absed on the fact that we have Notre Dame on our schedule this year?

I am a season ticket holder, and earlier this year, I tried to find Notre Dame tickets for the pastor at my church. As I recall, I was told that no tickets for the Notre Dame game were available on a single-game basis, and that they would only be available to those who purchased the entire season's worth of tickets.

Given that Notre Dame historically has had a very devoted fan base, and UCLA has not played Notre Dame in many years (at least the 15 or so years I've been watching the team), one would think that the anomaly of having the Fighting Irish on the schedule may be resulting in only a temporary bump in sales.

I sincerely wonder if there's an intern or two in the Central Ticket Office checking Stubhub or ebay for any tickets being sold for particular seats game in and game out this year... that is, for games OTHER than Notre Dame.

MIM