Dec. 8, 2000

By SCOTT CAIN
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Going bowling on short notice could limit Arkansas' fan following to the Las Vegas Bowl, leaving the athletic department with as much as a six-figure added expense.

Arkansas is obligated to pay the bowl for 12,500 tickets at a cost of $625,000, Athletic Director Frank Broyles said. Hopeful expectations among bowl officials are that 10,000 Arkansas fans will travel to watch the Dec. 21 game against UNLV.

That would leave 2,500 unsold tickets. There are five prices, so how many tickets in each price range remain would determine how much money Arkansas would have to spend. For instance, if the average cost of the remaining tickets was $50 each, the bill would be $125,000.

If extra tickets have to be bought, the money won't come out of the athletic department's operating budget. Arkansas will get to keep more than $600,000 of the bowl's $800,000 payout before sharing the rest with the other SEC schools.

"We would be delighted if we can get 10,000 out here," said Tina Kunzer-Murphy, managing director of the Las Vegas Bowl. "I think if we had more time and the way Arkansas travels, the sky's the limit -- 15,000 to 20,000 would be great. But we understand the restraints."

The restraints are time, distance and the travel costs that go with booking on short notice.

The matchup was not announced until 5 p.m. Sunday, 18 days before the game, because Las Vegas Bowl and school officials had to wait on the developments at other bowls before making their arrangement. Airlines' best fares on 21-day advance purchase had expired by then.

Las Vegas is roughly 1,500 miles from Little Rock, making driving a time-consuming choice.

Fans weren't even able to make an educated guess at which bowl Arkansas would play in and then take a chance on booking ahead. Different scenarios existed that could have sent the Razorbacks to games in Houston or Hawaii. Shreveport and San Jose, Calif., were in the mix for a while.

Arkansas took about 30,000 fans to the Cotton Bowl last year and about 18,000 fans to the Citrus Bowl in 1998. Both games were played on Jan. 1, giving fans almost two weeks more than this year's game to make plans. And for most fans, Dallas was a cheap, half-day drive.

Arkansas officials aren't giving updates on sales this year like they did last year, when tickets moved so fast that fans gobbled up some of Texas' allotment, too.

Broyles said he did not want to estimate how many fans might end up making the trip. It's too early to tell, he said, "because we were planning on going to Hawaii all the way and it wasn't until 4 o'clock Sunday afternoon that we knew we were going to Las Vegas. So we've shifted gears."

UNLV sold 6,000 tickets the first two days they were available this week, UNLV associate athletic director Terry Cottle said.

UNLV has bought 2,000 general admission tickets to give away free to students.

The game will be televised on ESPN2, but it will be blacked out in southern Nevada if the game does not sell out.

Ticket prices are $10, $30, $50, $75 and $125.

The most expensive are club seats that include food and beverages, "and those are going real good," Broyles said. "We have a limited number of $75 tickets. Those are the next choice of tickets, and we've about sold out of those -- real good seats in a special section. We have a lot of $50 seats."

And the cheap seats?

"We'll sell them, but we've got to come up with $625,000," Broyles said, "so why sell a $10 ticket? I don't think anybody who goes to Las Vegas is going to want to sit in the end zone.

"We've offered the $10 ticket. I don't think we've sold a one."

The athletic department usually mails out order forms near the end of the regular season asking fans if they would be interested in bowl tickets. It didn't look like Arkansas would go to a bowl until the final week of the season this year so no forms were sent out.

If he had it to do over again, Broyles said he would have had forms sent out that asked fans to indicate which bowls they would attend among Las Vegas, Hawaii, Houston, San Jose, Calif., and Shreveport.

Associate athletic director Bill Gray spent part of the week in Las Vegas trying to arrange charter flights for fans. Broyles said he hopes to have news about a charter originating from Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport and one from Little Rock.

It's too early to tell whether the Las Vegas Bowl will break its attendance record of 28,227 that was set last year when Utah beat Fresno State 17-16, Kunzer-Murphy said. In addition to sales from both schools, the bowl has presold about 3,000 tickets to Las Vegas-area groups.

This is UNLV's first bowl game since 1994, and Arkansas is the first SEC team to play in the Las Vegas Bowl in its nine-year history.

"There's a lot of excitement for this game, and it has created a sense that 'I've got to be at the game,' " Kunzer-Murphy said. "Everyone is talking about the game. I think a lot of that has to do with the University of Arkansas. More awareness has been created by the opponent."