Bow down to Washington (his face is on the dollar bill)

When anyone asks where I live in Seattle, I usually use Husky Stadium -- the nearest major landmark -- as my reference point. Although it's been years since I attended a game in the stadium, I pass by it -- on foot and/or by car -- virtually every day. As a result, I keep watch over it with a certain sense of fond proprietorship.

So I'm well aware that a large portion of the stadium is about to be torn down and rebuilt, at a cost of $250 million. The University has been longing to remodel the stadium for many years. The legislature, however, felt that it had better uses for the taxpayers' money. Therefore, the UW finally decided to borrow whatever money it couldn't raise from donors. As the front page article in today's Seattle Times notes, a possible result will be a downgrade in the rating of the University's bonds, making it more difficult for the school to borrow money for other puposes in the future.

The new stadium will have slightly fewer seats -- 71,197 -- but much glitzier facilities. The prices will be glitzier, too, which seems to be the point of the entire endeavor. Ticket prices haven't been fully established yet, but seats near the 50-yard line will run about $1,000 for a season ticket. "Premium" seats would run $2,000-$3,000. Don't expect to rub shoulders in the stadium with the riffraff, the many taxpayers who are just getting by.

Or with kids not accompanied by wealthy parents.

In fact, speaking of kids, one obstacle to maximization of income has always been that the student section is centered on the 50-yard line on the north side of the stadium. That was then, this is now. In the new stadium, the students will find themselves huddled together beyond the end zone. Thus ends the last remnant of the pleasant fiction that college football is primarily a student activity for the amusement of the students, with ticket sales to alumni and others providing a source of income that is welcome but of secondary concern.

My modest proposal, which may not seem outlandish in a few more years, is that the students be assembled inside or outside of the student union building, depending on weather, where they can watch "their" team play on large screen TV. After all, even those end zone seats can be sold for a lot more than ragamuffin students can afford to pay.

When I attended Big Game in Palo Alto a couple of years ago -- played in just-remodeled Stanford stadium -- I noted that the Stanford student section had also been moved from the 50-yard line down to a portion of the end zone. Thus goes life in the "academically oriented" Pac-10. Can you imagine what it must be like at a school in the SEC?