It's not just the standard epitaph; it's a demonstrable fact.
I bought Big Game tickets yesterday, which means my streak of attendance at the annual Cal-Stanford football match-up can continue unbroken this November. But I was very, very lucky to be able to, and many, many loyal Cal fans were not as fortunate.
Ever since the two schools decided decades and decades ago to let the football game be the outlet for inter-school antipathy, they have taken turns hosting it in their heretofore extremely large (75,000+ seat) stadiums. By contract each school got to sell about half the seats at either stadium to its own fans, and at a typical game you'd usually end up seeing two-thirds to one-half of the crowd decked out in the home team's colors, and the rest in the visitor's. At least that's how it's all tended to work so far.
But a few things have coincided this year to change all that: One, that Cal in recent years is actually playing good football - of a quality that hasn't been seen in several decades - and thus is attracting more people who actually want to watch it play. Two, the contract between Cal and Stanford agreeing to give the visiting school an allotment of half the tickets apparently expired last year. And three, Stanford knocked down its old 85,000-seat stadium and replaced it with a 50,000-seat one.
Shrinking the stadium obviously was going to reduce the number of tickets available. Split in half, each school was now going to have 15,000 seats less than they would have otherwise. And that's only if they each got half. Because the contract had expired, this year Stanford decided to only give Cal 15,000 seats total, keeping 35,000 for itself and giving Cal only a fraction of what it used to have.
Some rivalry... Particularly when you consider that while Cal's play has had it competing for elite end-of-season bowl games, Stanford was something like 1-10 last year. And when Stanford's not playing well, its fans don't care. Last year in Berkeley the stadium was almost entirely blue and gold. Only a tiny fraction of the crowd was wearing Stanford's red and white, and that included their rather large band. As we could see, when the going got tough, Stanford fans didn't even bother to show up. Some rivalry, indeed.
Obviously anything could happen this year, and the fortunes of either team could easily be reversed. But there's reason for everyone to think that Cal will have a similar season this year as it did last, and the same goes for Stanford. Which makes Stanford's ticketing decision look all the more petty. Because it knows that so many people will potentially be interested in seeing Cal's last regular season game, it looks like it's keeping all those seats to itself to profit off of.
Of course, Cal itself is also not immune to criticism. The athletic department, suddenly faced with a reliably competent football team and the increased local popularity such athleticism engenders, is starting to exploit it in ways that are particularly alienating to those long-suffering fans who have been filling the seats even in all those dark years when the same could not be said. Suddenly being a Cal fan has become a very expensive and very inequitable thing. Which is worth a diatribe itself, but for now the important point is that after 5000 seats were set aside for students, the remaining 10,000 were only available for Cal fans who were major donors or season ticket holders, and of the latter only a small fraction were able to get them. So what's everyone else to do?
So far the best possibility seems to be to buy Stanford season tickets. Which to a Cal fan seems at first like complete sacrilege. But on further inspection, it's a plan with a certain machiavellian brilliance. First of all, it's not economically unrealistic. The Big Game ticket the package includes would have cost about $70 alone, so subtract that price from the package deal to see the true cost of this plan. Then you can also subtract the Stanford-Notre Dame game ticket, which can probably be sold to a Notre Dame fan, possibly even at a premium. The same may also be true for the Stanford-UCLA game. Which means that there's only a few more games' tickets that a poor Cal fan would need to eat.
But here's the thing: wouldn't it be great if Stanford Stadium turned into a ghost town for all those games because of all the non-Stanford fans who bought the tickets and couldn't be bothered to show up? Or, even better, what if all the Cal fans who had to buy the season ticket package turned up themselves at these games proudly wearing their blue and gold and rooting for the other team? As it is I've heard of some Cal fans who'd bought a block of 30 season tickets - that would be a pretty impressive show of blue and gold already.
Is such a plan very sportsmanlike? Well, possibly not. But a healthy rivalry always involves some sort of efforts to subvert the other team or its fans. I mean, Stanford's recurrent attempts to paint the Big C red or the unspeakable things they annually do to innocent little teddy bear effigies aren't exactly sportsmanlike either, but they're part of the rivalry and moral equivalents of this sort of plan. But there's no comparison between these essentially harmless pranks and one school openly screwing the other on tickets. It's not clever one-upsmanship; it's just exploitation. And not by passionate fans loyal to their schools and communities, as has underpinned the 100+ year history of the Cal-Stanford rivalry, but by the academic institution itself.
Incidentally, Stanford isn't the only school behaving this way. The more money there is at stake in these events (and Cal's recent success has greatly raised the financial stakes), the more all the schools are getting sucked into an inappropriate tit-for-tat with regard visitors' tickets. USC last year, for instance, instead of giving Cal its usual 10,000 seat allotment (of the 90,000-seat stadium) to sell to its away-game fans, only gave Cal 5,000, thereby either shutting out thousands of Cal fans who wanted to see this very important game or leaving them to be exploited on the secondary ticket market. So this year, since the Cal-USC game will be played in Berkeley, Cal is getting even by only giving USC a small amount of tickets to sell to its traveling fans.
The Pac-10 really needs to step in and broker some sort of equitable convention among its teams regarding how these ticketing matters should be dealt with. It's bad for fans, bad for the schools, and bad for college sports in general when the schools get so blinded by dollar signs as to shut out their competitors' supporters. It's this behavior that's truly unsportsmanlike and runs completely counter to any notion that college sports can be healthy athletic and cultural activities that complement scholarship. Or even just fun.