Oh, Rick George, you beautiful genius, you. That was the plan all along, wasn’t it?
You hire Deion Sanders, the hottest college football coach on the planet. You know that Coach Prime’s home debut is against Nebraska and its Big Red Wave.
So what do you do? You stand up in front of the faithful and demand they not sell tickets to Cornhuskers fans. And you do so knowing full well that your pleas will go viral within Huskers Nation. Knowing also full well that every Nebraska fan worth their Dan Alexander replica jersey would take that as a challenge, and shell out however many Runzas it takes to get inside Folsom Field.
Well lookie here. The cheapest get-in ticket before fees for CU-Huskers in Boulder on Sept. 9 was a whopping $294 on Friday from VividSeats.com.
The average get-in price? A cool $435 — the most expensive ticket in modern CU football history. (The average get-in rate for Buffs-Huskers at Folsom in ’19, Mel Tucker’s home debut, clocked in at $283, the old CU single-game high via Vivid Seats.)
So don’t hate on Herbie Husker, Buffs fans. Thank them. Who’s going to pay for Coach Prime and his $5.5 million price tag? That red caravan of Bugeaters marching in from the east, for a start.
“We’re probably thinking that, if we’re giving (the Buffs) money to pay for Deion, it’s going to be even more fun when they lose,” laughed Dan Spencer, a Nebraska alum from Lone Tree, after I went over the numbers with him.
“I just hope Prime is as good as he thinks he is.”
They’re coming. Sanders and his five-star recruits. Nebraska and its five-star delusions. Both starships are set for a collision course Sept. 9 in Boulder, the kind of party ESPN’s College GameDay crew would be crazy not to crash.
Did you catch the College Football Playoff championship pregame show? There was Coach Prime, rocking the shades, making Nick Saban squirm. Kirk Herbstreit’s returning Ralphie’s calls again. And speaking of calls, whisper a soft prayer for Cecil Hairston.
Cecil’s the associate AD for ticket operations and sales at CU. Last January, he was the Pac-12’s Maytag Man, staring at silent phones while trying to fire up the locals for Year 3 of Karl Dorrell. A month ago, those same phones started ringing off the hook.
“It was non-stop,” Hairston laughed. “(Plus a flood of) emails in our inboxes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Hairston’s been around. Bowling Green. Cincinnati. Boise State. Oregon State at the apex of The Mike Riley Era, when Jacquizz and James Rodgers were running wild.
“But I’ve never seen anything like (this last month) with a fan base,” he said. “It was kind of like the perfect storm where the (CU) fan base went absolutely crazy for it.”
You want crazy? Jim Howard, VP at TicketCity.com, wrote me Friday to say that over the seven days following CU’s Dec. 3 announcement of Coach Prime’s hiring, browsing for Buffs tickets on the site went up 247%. The peak ticket price for a CU non-conference game was more than $1,000 per ticket, a 600% spike over last January. CU tickets were going for TWICE the average price of Oregon and Washington seats as of early January. Buffs tickets for September were 50% more expensive than seats for Utah, the defending Pac-12 champs.
“Across our resale marketplace of thousands of sellers,” Howard continued, “CU sold more tickets in the offseason than USC, Oregon, Washington and Utah combined.”
Meanwhile, Hairston’s department had roughly 2,000 season-ticket deposits in hand as of this past Thursday. A year ago at this time, CU was swimming in the 200-to-300-ish range.
“It keeps us busy,” Hairston said. “But busy’s a good thing, for sure.”
Even better, the Buffs expect a season-ticket renewal rate in the 94-to-95% range. That’s wicked high for CU and a healthy clip for any Power 5 school, period.
Among CU’s renewals, it should be noted, is our friend Dan, the Husker fan from Lone Tree. You see, Spencer is something of a double agent, holding season-ticket accounts with Nebraska and Colorado at the same time.
“I make up for it when Nebraska plays CU (in Boulder),” he explained. “Because if I wanted to, and I never do, I could sell those tickets for pretty high numbers. I usually end up giving them to my idiot friends.”
Those idiot friends, by the way, are already tingling. One of them, Tony Reinhard, another local Huskers diehard, heard the CU athletic director’s plea to keep the red out and took it more than a little personally.
“I saw him putting it out there, ‘Don’t sell to Nebraska fans,’” Reinhard recalled. “I chuckled.”
So did George, baby. All the way to the bank.
