Auburn can't sell football tickets/operate in black

Not just Georgia fans. There's been lots of stories of fans from the big boy schools doing that when they'd play the one in a 2-for-1 at a smaller school.

 

This is very true. A few years after I graduated, I still tried to get back at least once a year for a game. Even if I had to buy tickets, it was fairly reasonable.
Now?
I live a couple of hours away, so I'm buying two tanks of gas. Tickets and dinner are going to be another $150 or so, and that's for a non-SEC game against an FCS team. Add maybe another $100 for a top-notch game, if you can even get them.
Also factor in the drive -- 2 1/2 hours down, up to 4 with traffic coming back -- and you're looking at spending almost $300 and having a 14-hour day door to door. LSU shuts down incoming traffic to campus a few hours before the game, so if you don't want to walk two miles to the stadium you need to be there three or four hours beforehand.
It's a gigantic pain in the ass. I've covered a couple of games there since then, but haven't been to one as a fan since 2006. And I have no real desire to go. Thought about it once or twice, then realized the expense and aggravation (not to mention getting up early after working late on Friday night) and decided I'd rather just take a Saturday off.

 

Especially when half of them want to leave early to get drunk anyway.
With the better teams, it's also a difficult process to get tickets. There's lotteries, priority systems, maybe some witchcraft involved. When I was a freshman at LSU (during a down period in 1994) the tickets were $3 and they sold them at a table outside the student union all week. They practically begged people to buy them. More than once my friends and I bought them from the athletic department's ticket window on the way into the game.

That's obviously changed since then. Here's the student ticket prices in the SEC:
LSU - Variable, $6 to $25 per game. Five of seven games are $12 or less
Alabama - Three- and four-game packages, average $10 per game
Auburn - $140 for season tickets
Texas A&M - $225 for football season tickets, $350 for an all sports pass (as of 2013)
Mississippi State - $50 for season tickets
Ole Miss - $63 for season tickets
Arkansas - $10 per game, or $85 for a season pass that also covers men's basketball
Florida - $105 for season tickets
Tennessee - $10 per game
Georgia - Not available (couldn't find it anywhere in their info page)
Missouri - $165 for season tickets
Kentucky - $35 for season tickets
Vanderbilt and South Carolina - Free with payment of a student activity fee

So tickets are still reasonable, $10 a game or less, at most places except Auburn ($20), Texas A&M (about $32), Missouri (about $24) and Florida ($15).
I think it's more the hassle of going through the lottery that might be turning them off. Most of the lotteries are based on priority systems -- upper classmen have more priority -- and penalizes students for not using tickets. So you get a guy who can't get tickets as a freshman, and you don't indoctrinate him to going to games. By the time he's a junior and can move up the priority list, he doesn't miss it and figures why spend the money and go through the aggravation?

 

Some of those student tickets have gone up a lot in the last decade or so.

Those A&M tickets are a ripoff. You should not be charging students $30 a ticket. That's ridiculous. That's the most I've ever heard of student tickets costing.

 

Out this way, Pac-12 schools are facing a lot of heat from season ticket holders about the number of night games, which are usually only announced a couple weeks in advance. Since the P12 signed the deal with ESPN and Fox usually only one or two games a week start before 6 p.m. local time. People don't want to face an hour-long drive home past midnight, so they just don't come.
Playing a night game used to be a big deal - when you were the only team in the conference playing at the time, but now it's like Fox and ESPN dump the Pac-12 into the late-night spot like the old Big West games.

 

I know it will never happen, but it'd be nice if they limited the number of night games each school can play.

I covered a top 10 program and I doubt they played more than 2-3 night games a year. That was 15 years ago. This year they're playing five. A couple years ago they had seven, which is almost unheard of.

 

That can be problematic in the south and west, when it helps to play night games in the first half of the season. Does anyone really want to go watch a 2:30 kickoff at Arizona State in early September?

 

Don't they play in a stadium with a retractable roof?

Your point is valid. I covered a NFL game at the old stadium in September and it was insanely hot. But often, a 6 p.m. local start as opposed to 7:30 can make the difference between people being able to drive home afterwards and having to stay over at hotels that almost always have super jacked-up prices and two-night minimums.

 

No. Arizona State plays in Sun Devil Stadium, which is an open-air, on-campus stadium.

The Cardinals play at University of Phoenix Stadium, which is in Glendale, which is anywhere from a half-hour to an hour from Tempe, depending on traffic.

 

In 2013, Michigan charged $295 for student football tickets. Apparently, there was enough screaming about it that it was lowered to $175 for this season. Ohio State is at $250 for the season and believed to be the highest in the country. I was surprised to see how many schools have tickets in the $200 range for students. Anything above $20 a ticket for students feels like gouging.

 

Seems there are two choices here: 1) charge some over-arching activity fee (which many schools do) that everyone has to pay; or 2) selling a ticket package to those students who want one. My alma mater still does the activity fee, which means you pay whether or not you want to go. My daughter's school offers the season-ticket option. At her school, the fee (a bit less than $200) pretty much guarantees you a ticket to every home game (football, basketball, etc.).

As an aside, my best friend wanted to make sure that his daughter had access when she was a freshman at a big SEC school, so he bought her one of those total season passes. She used it once ... to go to a regular-season baseball game. That has to be close to the most expensive college baseball ticket in history.

 

My cousin's kid is a freshman at a big football school and about a month before her son left for school she got something in the mail for tickets and she forgot to send it in on time.

My cousin said, "I'm going to be living this one down for a long, long time..."

I can't imagine college without going to football games, even though I was covering them for my last three years.