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Chomping at Bits: Florida sells out of student tickets for opener

Florida doesn't deserve derision for doing what it can to put butts in seats.

By Andy Hutchins

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Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Chomping at Bits comes stocked with the best Florida Gators links and news we can find. Got a link we should check out? Email us at AlligatorArmy@gmail.com, subject line CAB, or find us on Twitter at @AlligatorArmy or on Facebook at Facebook.com/AlligatorArmy.

Florida sells out student tickets for New Mexico State: This news broke late Thursday.

Some people reacted to this news with joy.

Others responded with bitter skepticism.

Click through if you must, but it's a link to an article about North Korea paying Chinese fans to cheer for the oppressive regime in the 2010 World Cup — a claim that may or may not be true, but one that certainly makes sense as a parallel, because everyone knows that UAA and DPRK rhyme and are thus the exact same thing.

Jesting aside, though: Isn't getting creative to sell out The Swamp something Florida should do?

The value proposition of a ticket, especially for a student, is the experience of being in a raucous stadium with 80,000 (or so) other fans of the Gators — and if the barrier to entry is "Eh, I'll skip a lunch next week," more of those students are going to take the plunge. The UAA — really, all of the people involved in the industry of college athletics — hopes that a memory made on one Saturday in an undergraduate career makes for a lifelong consumer of the products on offer. (Have you ever noticed that insurance companies market heavily in college sports? That's because their industry is also kept afloat by long-term customers.) Why not take a hit when the cost of customer acquisition is theoretically so low?

"Student" tickets being sold out in this case probably requires a bit of fudging of the math, with some tickets that would otherwise have been bought and used by students getting sold as part of the student guest ticket deal or given away to long-time season ticket holders, as mentioned in the above linked piece. But no matter how the sales are done, if they're all sold and distributed, that's better than them not being sold and distributed — and while Florida (and every other athletic department in America) plays a little fast and loose with attendance numbers, I don't think it would announce a sellout when there isn't one.

Jim McElwain's "Perfect Thursday": McElwain basically wants a full-speed, full-fledged go-home practice on Thursdays of game weeks, as everyone explained yesterday. Enjoy the last sentence of the last post linked here. (Thomas Goldkamp, 247Sports | Jesse Simonton, Miami Herald | Chris Harry, GatorZone)

It's been 25 years since Spurrier's first Florida game: That's a while. Wish I could go back to 1990 and tell some fans in attendance that in 2015, Spurrier would still be coaching ... at South Carolina. (Chris Harry, GatorZone)

Softball assistant Jennifer Rocha wins national honor: The pitching coach savant who helped mold Hannah Rogers and Lauren Haeger into aces gets her due. (GatorZone)

Road trip! For the headline. (Aaron Brand, The Gainesville Sun)

Your Gators moments of zen:

Yeah, you could say Tim Tebow had his best game of the preseason on Thursday.

The comments are yours.