Ryan brings up a good point about the crowds in Mariucci. I sit in the
student section where everyone's pretty loud and has a good time cheering
etc. At times however, when we're going crazy in the student section I'll
look across a couple of sections and see that the fans are just sitting
there yawning and acting uninterested.
 
I think there are a lot of subdued fans at Mariucci because the only
people who can afford tickets are alumnus - people who are generally over
40 and who would feel silly getting into the game or the cheers. The
other big factor in why there are so many empty seats is corporate ticket
sales. The U sold a lot of season ticket packages to the big companies
like 3M, Pillsbury, ect. and the executives who get to use the tickets
use them sometime and waste them a lot of the time.
 
The U raised 18,000,000 to build Mariucci arena, and a lot of that money
was raised on ticket surcharges and big corporate ticket sales. So they
have to charge a lot for tickets in order to pay off the building.
 
It would be nice if the athletic dept. made student (cheap tickets)
sections on both sides of the ice. If these tickets were say, $8 and were
sold either as student season ticket packages or reserved to be sold to
the general public and students more people could enjoy Gopher hockey.
It's probably not economically feasible but it would be a nice gesture.
 
What burns my butt is seeing the great seats along the blue lines/red
line empty because some dumb corporate ticket holder didn't feel like
going or didn't give the tix to someone who would have enjoyed seeing the
game.
 
Reed