.......Yeah, Mach........
Originally posted by MACHIAVELLI
GEAUX ICON
.................This Article says it All.................
Gary Laney column: Tickets for MSU's Grambling game won't last long (8/19)
By GARY LANEY
AMERICAN PRESS
If you want a good seat to the McNeese State-Grambling game Aug. 31 and you don't have tickets yet, you better act fast.
Some McNeese fans think that because only about 5,000 season tickets were sold by the end of last week, that there will be plenty of good seats in the 17,410-seat stadium available today when the single-game tickets go on sale.
Maybe, but don't count on it.
McNeese officials are reporting rare interest in this game and much of the interest is coming from the visiting team.
Tigers fans are famous for going on road trips. When you travel (and the solid McNeese traveling fan base can attest to this) you generally don't count on getting tickets at the gate of your destination. There's nothing worse than driving for hours only to find yourself denied a ticket, paying scalper prices or getting in a crummy seat.
So if you are a Grambling fan living in Houston, or Shreveport or New Orleans, you are going to be on the phone this morning getting the ticket you want. It's habit for them.
Meanwhile, here in Lake Charles, you have a McNeese fan base used to walking up at 6 p.m. on a Saturday night and still getting a pretty good seat to a game. McNeese draws well, but normally about half the crowd waits until Saturday to get their seats.
That's not going to work this time. Here's how it's going to break down.
You have about 12,000 reserved seats in the stadium. Some 5,000 have been sold as season tickets. About 1,500-2,000 more go as "comp" tickets to players' and coaches' families, school officials, and as a trade for services by local businesses (including this one, which gets an allotment of season tickets in exchange for display ads).
You also have to throw in tickets that are going to go to McNeese students and you can't forget that both the McNeese and Grambling bands will be in the stands. Between the students and the bands, that may be a couple thousand more seats.
So we've accounted for about half the available seats that aren't going to be available to the general public right off the top.
Now, let's bring in the Grambling factor. Fans of the Tigers I've spoken to estimate that they will bring about 10,000 people to the game, either local or traveling.
A few hundred of those tickets have been sent to Grambling as a visitor's allotment. Those are probably all accounted for so most Tigers fans are going to turn to calling Lake Charles.
The best guesses I've heard say about half of the expected Grambling crowd will try to buy tickets in the next couple of days. So add about 5,000 sales to the visitors add them to the 9,000 or so we've already accounted for, and you are down to fewer than 3,500 tickets.
If you wait more than a couple of days, expect to pay the full $16 for a reserved seat and not the cheaper $10 general admission seats. Many of the Grambling fans have shown an interest in the cheaper tickets, where they can sit near their band (which is seated in a general admission area) and the traditional visitor's area in the northwest corner. That means those will probably sell out before the reserved seats are gone.
If McNeese fans buy tickets early and the Grambling fans move in as expected, this thing might sell out this week. It's not out of the question that you could have a Cowboy Night scrimmage where tickets for the home opener are already sold out.
Of course, if that happens, then McNeese would sell standing room only tickets, a possibility that's already being taken as almost a given. Officials say they will sell the standing room seats on game day, filling the hill on the north end zone first, then filling the seats in the south end zone.
When it's all said and done, even the most conservative estimates say that 20,000 fans will stuff the stadium, probably more.
