MORGANTOWN —
A day late but hardly a dollar short, Matt Wells returned a phone call Tuesday morning.
“I feel like Johnny Cash,” the man whose title of assistant director of athletics, sales and marketing puts him in charge of marketing West Virginia University tickets, said.
“Johnny Cash?”
“Yeah, I’ve been everywhere, man,” he said.
On this day he was calling from Dallas, where the only thing hotter than the 105-degree weather was the demand for WVU tickets. “I was in Minneapolis, flew to Pittsburgh for a wedding, now I’m in Dallas.”
This was Big 12 business on this day as the Mountaineers get ready for their official entrance into the conference Sunday.
With the end of the sale of season tickets just about here, Wells and his staff have surpassed 36,000 in sales, which is up 2,000 from last year and just 2,200 short of the maximum 38,200 they can sell.
All of that, of course, is the result of what Wells calls nearly “the perfect storm.”
It has been to the WVU athletic department about as it would be to McDonald’s if it were discovered that Big Macs added years to your life.
WVU is coming off a 70-33 victory in the Orange Bowl, is returning a team that many believe is capable of contending for a national championship and is moving into the Big 12 Conference — all at one time.
“It definitely is a combination of all those factors,” Wells said. “We would have been in position for a good sales year if one or two of those factors were in place. If only we were coming off an Orange Bowl victory or if only we were returning the type of players we have or if we only were switching to the Big 12 you could expect good sales numbers.
“Combine them all and you have almost the perfect storm.”
Today is going to be the cutoff point for season ticket renewals and sales with mini-packages of Baylor, Oklahoma and Kansas along with single-game sales about to begin as soon as they figure out how many they will have to offer in the 60,000-seat Milan Puskar Stadium.
“We anticipate great demand for single game and mini-packages,” Wells said.
This is a season in which WVU will play five Big 12 home games. Every other year they will play five at home with four in the other seasons. With the James Madison game scheduled for a neutral field at the Washington Redskins Fed-Ex Stadium, there are seven home games this year.
That is a reason it is important for WVU to play well at home and to create demand for those tickets as they go into what will be a yearly difficult Big 12 schedule.
“Obviously, you want to capitalize on the positive momentum that’s in place,” Wells said. “You want to put a product on the field that is entertaining. Winning is crucial.”
In the years when there are only four Big 12 games the Mountaineers are trying to make sure they schedule a big-time neutral field game that will pay as if it is a home game, such as the 2014 meeting with Alabama.
Email Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com. Follow on Twitter @bhertzel.
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