Update: 2:23p Friday. Tickets have been snatched up over the past three days. While there’s still some rows empty in the corners of the upper bowl and single tickets in the lower one, most of the seats have been sold. Only a few thousand tickets are left, and attendance will be probably north of 47,000 which is terrific. There are some reports coming out of CNY that thousands of Clemson fans swooped in this week and grabbed them. But let’s see how it looks tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully, it’s a tremendous Syracuse crowd.
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Saturday¬†marks a¬†historic day in Syracuse athletics. For all the upheaval, rebranding, and press releases about it, SU still hasn’t played an ACC game. At least not in football or basketball, which are the only sports that matter to realignment. Let’s face it: It makes far more sense to play St. John’s in soccer, and Providence in field hockey, than it does to travel to Georgia Tech for tennis or Miami for volleyball. But the sports that pay the bills want the checks to cash richer, so the two big ones forced the hand of the SU athletic department.
So¬†Saturday¬†at 3:30 p.m. is Syracuse’s first crack at the big time. Third-ranked Clemson comes into the Dome; it’s on national television; Don McPherson’s jersey will be retired; a Heisman hopeful under the Tiger center; and the Orange¬†
gets to prove it can run with the grown ups. But the early returns are not great.
SU just released tickets for the lower bowl that go on sale¬†Thursday. Yep, lower bowl seats are still available. You can get the $75 family pack. That’s four tickets in section 332, parking, and $5 in concessions for the first game in ACC history against a national-title contender. The first 10,000 fans get a free 8×10 of D-Mac.
And there are still plenty of tickets left. You don’t have to wait until¬†Thursday. You could go on the¬†Carrier Dome website right now¬†and buy a slew of tickets in the lower bowl for around $50 per. You want to buy an entire section? You can do that. The upper bowl has blocks of rows still empty. The graph on the seating chart says light blue sections mean there’s some tickets left. Darker blue says lots of tickets. There’s sure a lot of blue in that upper bowl. Most of those seats are $30.¬†
Football has been mediocre for awhile at SU. Groobers bled the life out of the program. Doug Marrone leaving was a gut punch. Against the only two legitimate teams it has played this season,¬†Syracuse was outscored 71-44. I totally understand Orange Nation’s hesitance to completely embrace SU football. I didn’t make it a priority to make it to this game, either.¬†
But the great ACC experiment has its first test with the #3 team in the country. And Daryl Gross is calling everyone in his two iPhone contact lists to buy four seats. While SU has told us¬†everything has changed, if there are swaths of empty seats¬†Saturday, it means the ACC doesn’t change everything.¬†
Posted: D.A.
