Utah Utes football: Fans kicking in for season tickets

Zack Lassiter, who is in his fourth year as the University of Utah assistant athletic director for ticket operations, is finding football game days are pretty quiet this year. Not many fans are coming to the ticket office, and those who do often go away disappointed.

"When people come up to the window expecting to buy tickets, they're being turned away for the first time," he said.

That's because the Utah football team has seen a 5,000-seat spike in its season-ticket sales this year and is averaging a record 45,274 fans for a stadium that officially holds 45,017.

Rice-Eccles Stadium was built in 1998, four years before the 2002 Winter Olympic Games' opening and closing ceremonies were held there. Stadium attendance was actually 10,000 less than capacity for a couple of years, but it shot up when Urban Meyer became coach for two seasons starting in 2003 and has hit its peak this year.

If you didn't buy tickets by the end of the summer, it's been next to impossible to get into Ute games this year. You want to see the TCU and BYU games next month? There are a few tickets left for TCU, but forget about BYU, unless you're willing to pay scalpers' prices or want to wait in line overnight for available student tickets.

So what has happened lately to make a Utah football ticket as hard to find as a Jazz playoff ticket?

One big reason, of course, is a winning program. Everyone loves a winner. Football season-ticket sales have risen every year since the BCS-busting 2004 season. With 5,000 more season tickets sold than last year, single-game ticket sales have almost been eliminated.

"The pool of remaining seats on a per-game basis has shrunk dramatically to the point where this year the only tickets available for any home game is the allotment we save for the visiting team," Lassiter said.

The Utes set aside 3,000 seats in the southwest corner of the stadium for the visiting team each game, but except for BYU, only about 1,000 of those seats are usually used by visiting teams each home game. While some of those seats are still available for the TCU game Nov. 6, there are none available for the Nov. 22 BYU game.

Another reason for the upturn is the emergence of a student organization called "The MUSS."

The MUSS was organized

in 2002 as a partnership between the U. Student Alumni Association and the athletic department as a way to get students excited and involved in the home football games.