quote:
I think it was more of a issue with Duck fans either A)could not find any tickets in time to buy or B)did not want to spend, a grand, 2 grand, 4 grand for a single ticket. I am guessing the later. But you must know, Over a hundred thousand Ducks did make the long trip to Zona. Most just did not buy a ticket to the game.

PMJI, but there's another explanation. Oregon doesn't have the tradition, longstanding fanbase or long-term alumni booster support that Auburn or most other SEC teams have.

Plus, there are more alumni / boosters / students / well-heeled fans at Auburn than Oregon. Add to that the fact that there's precious little reason to stick around bumfark Alabama in the dead of winter. And many of us had already made one trip to Arizona last season; maybe the economy's booming down south, but out here it still sucks.

Several of my friends went to the game -- I couldn't make it having blown my travel budget on a roadie to Wazzu last year -- and according to them, the mix was roughly 60/40 barners. Clear domination, attendance-wise, but not exactly a blowout.

Y'all have to realize that us Oregawn fans are relatively new to this whole football-as-worthy-of-our-attention thing.

We spent decades worth of Saturdays in the fall fishing, hunting, skiing, sailing, protesting, getting high, etc.. anything *but* going to Autzen. The students rarely filled their allotment of 5000 seats, except for the OSU game, and the only other game that came close to selling out was Washington -- because their fans would drive down I5 in their Jags, buy up all the tickets and treat it like another home game. Embarrassing.

I vividly recall games at Autzen in the early-mid 70s with 15k fans bouncing around the concrete bowl as the Ducks would get shellacked again. The low point was a game against Utah in '75; we'd lost 15 straight games, and the announced attendance was 11,000, most of whom were disguised as empty bench seats.

It's only been around the last 25 years or so that we've even dreamt of any degree of consistent relevance within the *conference*, never mind nationally.

So with Oregon, you get the football-fan equivalent of someone who grows up in a double-wide and suddenly learns they've inherited a fortune. The new fans -- I don't call them bandwagonners, but they do bear the traits -- weren't born into it, not used to it like U$C or Udub fan (at least before Udub crashed and burned into obscurity). As a result we tend to be less arrogant and insufferable than Trojan or Husky fan -- but also somewhat cocky, parochial and hair-trigger defensive.

I chuckle at some of my fellow Duck fans' reaction to the question here. I can tell you Autzen can be loud and intimidating. But to say there's any comparison to a full Tiger Stadium for a conference night game requires a degree of delusion that I can't reach.

It's math, folks. 92,000 > 59,950. Especially after drinking all day. Which is one reason I'm glad this game isn't being played there, although I'd love to see a home-and-home.

[link=(www.benzduck.com)]Check out my blog, "duck downs";[/link]; it's dedicated to the pre-Nike years of Duck football. You can see what we suffered through.