Fanning the Flames of Student Rage

USC sells student passes at the beginning of the year that allow admission to all games for all sports. Individual student seats are unassigned, but large sections are reserved for them. In all, about 12,000 are sold, but not everybody goes to every game. After averaging 6,950 students at football games over the last three years (max of 7,540), USC realized that they didn’t need to reserve all 12,000 seats. With even cheap seats running $35 at each of 6 home games, they could project $1,060,500 in lost ticket sales for the 2006 season.

So USC sold the usual 12,000 student passes, but only reserved 8,000 seats. 8,500+ bearers showed up on Saturday, and that’s when things got messy (the stragglers tend to be the drinkers). Eventually standing-room only areas were opened up on the grass near the end zone to avoid any further escalation.

Students (and some alumni like me) responded that night with a new protest group on social-networking site Facebook.com. It seems the group has recently been deleted (I would speculate due to language and/or other TOS violations), but the furor remains.

The University has since responded by adding 600 student seats and is trying to create a standing-room only section of 400 more. That, along with earlier gate openings, should ease the problem. We’ll find out if it works at the Trojan’s next home game against Washington on October 7.