Getting an empty feeling in L.A.
UCLA has fallen an awful long way from the program that could be counted on to win a couple conference titles each decade. It's about to get worse.
The Washington Huskies have won three games at the Rose Bowl in the past 27 years.
I’ve been there for each of those games. I bring this up because I’m not going to be at Friday night’s game, but neither is anyone else from the sound of it.
In fact, the Bruins sound downright desperate for company, offering tickets at Costco. Seriously. A four-pack of sideline seats for $99. Free tickets for student groups. Desperate times it would seem.
Now someone more prone to taking cheap shots might see an opportunity here. That person – being of an unbearably cynical nature – might make a crack about how much better attendance will get when UCLA joins the Big Ten and gets to host such natural rivals as (check notes) Rutgers. Or Illinois. And from the Big Ten’s perspective, when you’ve got a chance to add a school that can average of 30,072 people in its 90,888-seat home field over its first three games, well you can’t pass that up. Now, to be fair, seating capacity for UCLA games is 53,390 because they use tarps to block off a gang of seats.
But I’m not that cynical, and I understand that the live audience isn’t what the power brokers of college football focus on these days. It’s all about time slots, TV channels and market size. UCLA isn’t desirable for the Big Ten because of its football program or its (dwindling) fan base. UCLA is desirable because it’s part of this nation’s No. 2 television market and that made the conference more valuable to its primary customer: FOX.
Now this might be starting to sound familiar. It was only a little more than two weeks that I was whining about the way that college football has catered to television at the expense of its ticket-buying customers for granted. I’m not going to revisit that here. I am going to ask a question, though: Is UCLA going to be better off for its impending move to the Big Ten?