While the Florida ticketing office may find it surprising that their 75 student tickets allotted for the UCSB and UCLA games didn’t sell out, I’m certainly not. Expecting students to pay $154 up front to watch the Gauchos and Bruins is asinine.
With tuition hikes and scholarship cuts every year, finding 75 students willing to shell out that much money is going to be harder to do than finding a 2011 FSU graduate a job. Watching this basketball team “rise up” over the past four years, I’m really appalled by the ticketing office’s discouragement of having that “sixth man” on the court via students in attendance.
I’m not saying that boosters and alumni don’t cheer, but no one can argue that students don’t do it better. Whether it takes adding $5 to booster ticket prices to subsidize student tickets or just making the University Athletic Association take a hit, the responsibility for any lack of Gator spirit in later rounds of the NCAA tournament is going to rest solely on the UAA’s shoulders.
Go Gators.
