[NU Sports] NU fans jump the gun

[Herman Wang]

from Medill alum Darren Rovell's ESPN.com story--
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/bowls05/news/story?id=2266118

For a team to get the most bang for its bowl bucks, it's important to 
communicate to the fan base that the school gets credit only for sales that 
come from its allotment. It's a problem sometimes in the hours just after a 
bowl selection is announced, as impatient fans who want to guarantee their 
seats don't wait to hear about the school distribution.

That happened to Northwestern this year. Despite an e-mail urging fans to 
buy through the school, the phones lit up in El Paso just after the news 
broke that the Wildcats were heading to the Vitalis Sun Bowl to face UCLA.

"Once the matchup was announced, we were inundated by calls coming from 
Northwestern fans," said Sun Bowl executive director Bernie Olivas. "That 
meant that, at least initially, they weren't buying from their group of 
seats."

A school such as Northwestern, with a much smaller enrollment as the only 
private institution in the Big Ten, needs every advantage it can get in the 
travel bowl game. In 2000, the Wildcats were conference co-champions, but 
slipped all the way to the Alamo Bowl partly because every other eligible 
Big Ten school had a larger alumni base.

Northwestern's athletic director, Mark Murphy, wouldn't say how many of the 
8,000 allotted Sun Bowl tickets the school would sell this year, other than 
that things were going "fairly well."