Arizona’s football team is off to its second straight 3-0 start, albeit against a lineup of opponents this year’s Salpointe Catholic varsity team might contend with.

But even with that strong start that hasn’t stopped the annual September ritual of UA sports fans eagerly anticipating the start of the men’s basketball season. This year is no different, considering how quickly the Wildcats’ instrasquad scrimmage has sold out.

That’s right, all 14,545 seats in McKale Center have been sold for the Oct. 12 game, which is the unofficial start of five months’ worth of hoops obsession in Southern Arizona. Granted, the tickets were only $8 for adults and $5 for kids, but that’s pretty damn impressive.

Good news, though, for all you ticket-buying stragglers: There are still season tickets available, including ones in the “non-priority” areas (read: you can touch the McKale ceiling), for the low, low price of $421 apiece. There’s also spots left in priority areas; that is, if you first donate at least $5,000 toward the school’s latest capital improvement plan … and that’s before you pay the $421-$607 per-seat amount and the $100 to $1,500 “priority” surcharge.

(Hey, you want Arizona athletics to remain self-sufficient and not have to rely on funding that’s controlled by our Legislature, right? Then pay up!)

For those a little less … financially solvent, there’s always the single-game route. Those tickets run between $21 and $130, depending on the location and opponent.

Meanwhile, it appears that PLENTY of seats remain for Arizona’s remaining four football home games, considering the vast amounts of empty seats at Saturday’s game. And for all you complainers that get mad at having games at 7:30 p.m. … and then again when they’re at 11 a.m. or 12:30 p.m., think about that when you fork over big bucks for hoops games that tip off at 8 p.m. On a weeknight.

This article appears in Sep 12-18, 2013.

3 replies on “Is It Basketball Season Yet? 14,000+ People Think So”

  1. Does UA athletics get state money? When we sad sacks at the School of Music grumble about how much money athletics has (and our own extreme lack of funding by comparison), we’re always told that athletics make their own money and aren’t given any by the state to make us feel better. True/not true? Asks the UA School of Music employee who has 2 tickets to the Red/Blue game…

  2. Don’t forget the additional costs — it was an additional $3 to print your tix AT HOME, $5 to pick them up and $8 to have them mailed (or something like that).
    Seemed like extortion to me, so I decided to not participate this year.

  3. @Sillynilly: UA athletics are completely self-sufficient, one of only a handful of athletic programs in the country that are able to be. If they weren’t, no doubt they’d have felt the pain of state budget cuts.

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