The News & Observer reports that…
N.C. State’s ticket office has sold about 5,500 of its allotment of 10,000 seats for the Papajohns.com Bowl, State assistant athletics director Brian Kelly said Thursday.
Remember that these are only tickets sold officially through the Wolfpack Club.
I usually suggest obtaining tickets from the WPC for bowl games; but, that is not the best course of action if you are looking to obtain the best seats for bowls that have miniscule levels of pre-sales. Usually you can get much better seats by ordering directly from the ‘official’ bowl ticket outlets.
The N&O’s story goes on to say,
Bowl sales and marketing manager Bo Kerr said most of the ticket orders taken directly by the bowl are received online, so it’s impossible to tell for sure how many patrons of that outlet are N.C. State fans. However, he said, there are a lot of orders from fans who have phone numbers with North Carolina area codes.
This is a good follow-up to Section Six’s entry on Tuesday based on an article from the Birmingham News linked here.
As of Friday afternoon, the bowl had directly sold 4,369 tickets since North Carolina State and Rutgers were announced Sunday as the participants. That is more than double the amount sold in the first week a year ago.
[snip]
The majority of fans who have purchased from the Papajohns.com Bowl directly since Sunday are N.C. State supporters.
“We think we’ll have more than 10,000 there,” N.C. State Athletics Director Lee Fowler said. “Whether it’s all from our allotment, we’ll see. We hope to sell all 10,000.”
A poster on PackPride’s message boards shared the following:
Went to the Wolfpack Club office yesterday to straighten some things out and was told that they have sold between 7 and 8K tickets to WPC members. We will have much more than 10K there after you factor in tickets sold through papajohns.com and ticketmaster.
Not only do I totally agree with the conclusion that we will have a lot more than 10,000 fans…I have felt that was pretty obvious from the start.
With that said, I’d like to sarcastically ‘thank’ Lee Fowler for using his opportunity with the media to under-estimate how many tickets for which NC State will be responsible. Given a fantastic opportunity to throw numbers into the public awareness and help position NC State as a program that travels fantastically well, Fowler goes with something akin to us hoping that we may have 10,000 fans there.
Really?
COME ON! GET AGGRESSIVE! MARKET and PROMOTE something other than yourself for once!
You know…even if it looked like we may only have 10,000 fans there, NOBODY in their right mind would UNDER-ESTIMATE the attendance number in public. Who wouldn’t take advantage of the chance to ’round up’ in this situation? Hell, Lee Fowler exaggerates everything else…why would he UNDER-PROMOTE NC State when given the chance?
(Folks, that’s rhetorical.)
Fowler never fails to capitalize on a media opportunity to promote himself; but please don’t ask him to use the media to actually positively promote NC State.
The numbers are obviously evolving to where we will definitely have more than 10,000 fans in Birmingham. Let’s guesstimate that we end up with 12,500 to 15,000…in Birmingham!?!? This would be AMAZING. Hell…that would be around the same number of fans that Coach O’Brien’s former school – Boston College – has taken to their last three bowls and two visits to the ACC Championship game COMBINED!
If State could collectively take anything near 10,000 people to Birmingham then the administration REALLY needs to take note and make sure that we don’t under-promote this kind of accomplishment.
Recent updates indicate that the bowl is announcing that over 38.5 thousand tickets have already been sold to this year’s game. For the record, East Carolina played in the inaugural PapaJohns.com Bowl two years ago in front of an inflated 32,500 fans.
Lastly, we are talking some interesting stuff about Vegas/NC State/Russell Wilson in this entry. The comments section have some interesting finds including some links from JimValvano that include the following conclusion:
Put it this way: If the odds on a new season were issued right now, this would be the projected Orange Bowl game instead of Virginia Tech-Cincinnati.
