Cougars enjoying company

PULLMAN – You could say it’s a Coug thing, that the one year Washington State could sell more football season tickets, it can’t.

Now, having sold all those tickets, the Cougars can go to work on getting everyone to use them.

Perhaps starting the game before last call would help.

Wait, in fairness, neither the late TV start nor the Saturday weather was the fan drain that could have been anticipated, and the announced head count for the Cougars’ unneighborly 49-8 pasting of Idaho – 34,858 – made it Wazzu’s best-attended Pullman opener in history.

Except that it was technically Idaho’s home game … sold as part of WSU’s season ticket package.

This demonstrates once again that not only are these college football’s oddest bedfellows, but also the chummiest – no matter what the score would suggest.

Only the Cougars could call what transpired at Martin Stadium a salve, though if the Vandals could have managed to hang on to the football the score may not have been quite so unsightly and they could have pronounced it progress. As it is, the drawing board awaits the Vandals again.

For the Cougs, it was all good – well, 95 percent of it – and especially for quarterback Josh Swogger, who, unlike a week ago, had the pleasure of both good protection and reception and by a quarter to nine had his pajamas on, but not because he’d been sent to his room. Unfortunately, there was word of a knee injury of unknown severity, tempering the celebration somewhat.

So the Cougars aren’t completely moved back into the Giddyville Arms. Maybe it’ll be a halfway house all season.

At least the Cougars will be well-accompanied in both mirth and misery.

Demand for football tickets at WSU has never outstripped supply, but it did this year – a small waiting list actually forming when the Cougars halted season ticket sales at 15,447. That had to be done because of this back-scratch arrangement with the Vandals, who are allotted about 6,000 seats whether they’re the quasi-hosts or not, as well as the space reserved for students.

Athletic director Jim Sterk hopes to negotiate a few of those seats back into the season ticket pool, but if the current momentum continues, those won’t last all that long on the open market.

In the context of Cougar football, rarely have happier words been written.

The confluence of some sales and marketing hustle with superior football has produced this relative glut at the gate – would you believe a 2,600 jump from the previous season-ticket high? – but there have been a lot of baby steps along the way. Every extra motel room and RV space helps, and Sterk believes that the annual Seattle game has goosed sales for Pullman games.

“We did a survey two or three years ago and discovered that about 30 percent of our attendance was people from the West Side,” he said. “I’d be interested to see some updated research on that.

“Whatever it is, you can do a lot of things but if you don’t have a product that people are interested in, they’re not going to come.”

Well, they’re coming. This game was about 250 short of a sellout, and the Oregon and USC games are already spoken for. Obviously, the Apple Cup will make it three.

That’s the great news. The bad is that it’s just putting the Cougars that much further behind.

In Corvallis, Oregon State is within a year of completing the first phase of its expansion of Reser Stadium, which will take that joint from a capacity of 35,362 to 43,000 next year. Beyond that, the Beavers’ wish list wants it boosted to more than 55,000.

That will leave Martin as far and away the smallest house in the Pacific-10 Conference, and will leave the Cougars sucking a bit of fiscal wind.

“It’s not just the size of the stadium,” said Sterk, “it’s what it means in annual revenue that drives our department.”

For instance, using OSU’s season ticket price of $170 as an average, the first phase of the Reser expansion could gross the Beavers an extra $1.3 million – and obviously there are premiums to be realized on top of that.

“People are developing suites, club seating and expansion all to generate annual revenue just to meet the needs of operating the department,” Sterk said. “Here at Washington State, for instance, our scholarship costs have gone up $1.2 million just in seven years – to over $4 million last year. So we need ways of garnering revenue on an annual basis and football is obviously the biggest help we have in doing that. And that’s why people are expanding stadiums. The fixed costs of a game don’t change much whether you have 5,000 people or 60,000 – but the net revenue certainly changes.”

And so Wazzu, which only now seems to have found a formula to fill 35,000-seat Martin Stadium on a regular basis, is finding itself in the position of justifying stadium expansion.

Alas, if it takes three 10-win seasons to prime the pump, that makes it a dicey proposition – if no less necessary.

Nonetheless, Sterk is plunging ahead. The Cougars have put together a master facility plan that comes in phases – Phase 1A and 1B, as Sterk labels them, adding somewhere between 6,500 and 7,000 seats, at an estimated cost of $50 million. About 5,000 of those would be gained with a second deck erected on the press box side.

Sterk pointed out that the absolute earliest the Cougars could begin any kind of construction – providing they can find the funding sources – is December 2005, and so it’s likely to be well after that. That further underscores the tenuous position the Cougars are in.

Even in making these unprecedented sales gains, the Cougars sell the cheapest tickets of their Northwest brethren – $160 for a season ticket, $29 for a single reserved seat. Oregon State, by comparison, charges $33 for most games and is nailing its supporters $55 for a Civil War ticket, and $60 for the USC game, a gouge being justified by – get this – the calendar shortening the college schedule back to 11 games this year, and thus denying OSU another home game.

At Oregon, a season ticket sells for $228. At UW, don’t you need a yacht to go to the games?

Those schools aren’t selling many tickets to fans who live five hours away, either.

But on Saturday, the opening night house was full like never before and the team across the state line got blown away. It was another good time to be a Coug. Those times get appreciated in full, because the challenges are inevitable.

That’s always a Coug thing.