TOMPKINS: ULL slips in attempt to step up
Bob Tompkins / Staff Reporter/Columnist
Posted on October 2, 2002
The University of Louisiana-Lafayette calls itself the University of Louisiana, even though there is another UL in Monroe.
ULL, which used to be USL and hates to be called ULL, craves a status higher than its sister school in Monroe and closer to that of LSU.
ULL folks have been saying for decades that LSU should agree to play its Ragin' Cajuns in football. LSU finally relented and will play them at Tiger Stadium Saturday.
LSU allotted 7,000 game tickets to ULL, but ULL returned 2,400. The school by Cypress Swamp -- the school that boasts that, through spending, it sustains more than 12,800 jobs in the Lafayette area -- couldn't sell 7,000 tickets to a game it has been clamoring for since - well, probably since the two schools last played in 1938.
The school that started pointing toward this game with bravado last spring, after a near brawl between ULL and LSU baseball players at the NCAA regionals, and harsh words between fans of the two schools at the softball regionals, couldn't live up to its big-time fantasy. It couldn't sell 7,000 tickets.
It's as if the little girl in her mother's clothes tripped trying to walk in high heels.
Even more baffling is ULL's reason behind returning the tickets: it didn't want LSU fans around Lafayette to gobble up all their fans' tickets, according to ULL president Ray Authement.
Come again?
Is this a decision worthy of the only university in Louisiana to offer a doctoral degree in cognitive science - the study of thinking and learning?
It wasn't surprising that Louisiana's second largest university, saddled with a 9-46 football record over the last five seasons, in an effort to boost its season ticket sales, hired a well-regarded new head coach in Ricky Bustle.
It wasn't surprising ULL sold tickets to the LSU game only to football season ticket buyers, alumni, faculty and students. Such strategy to encourage season ticket sales is not unusual.
Granted, it may have been one reason ULL sold twice as many season tickets as last year by the beginning of August. Sure, ULL wanted to sell its fans on sticking with the team through the long haul.
There's nothing wrong with giving season ticket holders the first opportunity to buy such tickets.
But once the deadline passed for selling season tickets, why would ULL care who bought single-game tickets?
No matter which school sells the tickets, LSU guarantees a payout of $400,000 to ULL, with game ticket revenue included in ULL's total.
ULL claimed to be looking out for its fans (season ticket holders), but in reality it punished its fans who didn't buy season tickets. These fans possibly didn't want to commit themselves for an entire season. Possibly, they couldn't afford to do so.
Maybe the school, for those people, should be known simply as UL, as in U Lose.