It's becoming increasingly difficult to root for the football team of my alma mater. Over the years, the NCAA press has been clogged with tales of University of Oregon players running a-duck (pffffft!) through Eugene like pillaging buccaneers. Millions of dollars were recently dumped into an "athlete's only" center clogged with expensive art and leather couches while many other campus facilities and classrooms continue to rot. Meanwhile, Nike-founder Phil Knight continues to dump his personal fortune into constructing stadiums and plush locker rooms. Rooting for the Oregon Ducks is like rooting for the Empire in Star Wars, especially now that they're (maybe? kinda?) the # 1-ranked NCAA squadron in the nation.

But the worst part of all of this? It's now more expensive to go to a flippin' college football game in Eugene than an NBA game in Portland. Tickets, which start at around $40 for nosebleed seats, routinely sell-out during the summer months, weeks before the first game of the season, and soon thereafter sell for upwards of $100 on various scalper websites.

Oh, wait, I just though of something more irritating than high ticket prices: this crap....

How much did the Athletic Department pay for that, exactly? If you can make it through all four minutes of this video and not become a life-long Portland Vikings fan, you're a better person than I. Also: take note of the Nike plug at the two minute mark. The days of rolling into Autzen Stadium with a $10 ticket or a free one from the box office at the EMU seems like a long, long time ago.

I spent a day down in Eugene last spring with my friends Sho, Chris and Chris' rather-awesome, obscenity-spewing exchange student pal who...dang, I can't remember her name. Anyway, we ate some tatter tots at Rennie's Landing and the waiter there was wearing a "I Love My Thugs" t-shirt, which we all though was rather awesome at the time. Check the Facebook page for that one.

Despite all the glitz and the pampered players and the irritating "home made" hip-hop, there's one thing that keeps bringing me back to the fold:

The Oregon Duck, AKA the "Hardest Working Mascot in the NCAA." He still does a push-up for every point the team scores during home games. I recently learned that the duck doesn't even have an official name. He usually goes by the Oregon Duck but has also been called Donald, Puddles or The Fighting Duck, according to Wikipeida.

What say you? Doesn't this adorable bastard deserve a proper nom de guerre?

Labels: Ducks, sports

$450

That's the price I watched two Ducks fans pay to get into Saturday's game.

$450.

For a regular season, college football game. That's a mark-up somewhere in the 500% range.

Two colleagues and I hit the footbridge in front of Autzen Stadium with an hour to go before kick-off. The scalpers were out in throngs but unwilling to let even the worst seat in the place go for less than $130. We headed off to a nearby Dutch Brothers, figuring that if we returned right as the game was starting they'd be more desperate and willing to let three tickets go for a lot less.

Hey, it was a plan that made sense at the time.

And we were completely and utterly wrong, of course. This was a major match-up between two of the nation's top tier teams. Ten minutes after kick-off we got down to some serious haggling with a scalper. He had three tickets thirty rows up from the field and was eager to be rid of them. We tried to talk him down to $80 a head but he wouldn't go a penny below $100. We passed. Within seconds, another fan wandered up and snagged all three for $350.

So instead of sitting inside the stadium we wandered the parking lot through throngs of RVs and lingering tailgaters. Someone in a Mr. Hankey costume was patrolling the grounds. We passed other fans content to sit next to their Winnebagos and watch the game on portable TVs.

We eventually ventured over to the Cooler, a barn-shaped bar near the stadium with a wall-to-wall TV but it had fans packed to the rafters. How a college football game, even a big, important one, can attract 58,000 people to lil' Eugene, OR. and untold numbers of others to local bars and stadium parking lots is beyond me. Then again, I'm only a casual fan.

So we settled for nachos and artichoke dip at a local McMenamins and watched the second half basically for free on a 22-inch screen. We saved ourselves $300 and saw the game anyway, which you've got to admit got pretty damn dull during the fourth quarter.

And I look forward to doing it all over again for the Civil War game. Maybe.

GO DUCKS!

Labels: Ducks, Eugene, sports