Speaking of ticket prices: completely by chance this afternoon, as I was cleaning out some (really) old boxes I came across a bunch of stuff from my UIUC days.
Among these I found my ticket stub from the Oct. 1990 game v. #24 Sparty. (Classic BT game, ABC 2:30 p.m. slot; Illini #8 in polls; Doug Higgins' five FGs, including the winner with under a minute left, gave the Illini a 15-13 win and kept us tied for 1st.)
We sat in the west balcony 20 rows up (so ~ halfway up, since this was long before the sky boxes ate up 2/3 of that balcony.) Down at the (IIRC) 10 yard line near the south EZ.
Ticket cost $20. That's ~ $45 in today's greenbacks. If the DIA is charging $75 face today for what I gather are similar, if not inferior, seats, that's 67% more than I paid for my seat in '90.
Especially given what I'd guess is dramatically lower demand today than existed for Illini football tiks in 1990, that demonstrates a huge growth in the cost base of the program.
I also found the stub for the game in Columbus two weekends earlier, when we beat #20 OSU 31-20. I bought it from the ticket office in Assembly Hall the preceding summer. Seats were in the visitors' section down near field level at the goal line.
It cost $19 (so, again, around $45 in today's $$.) My buddies snagged gameday scalper tickets in the upper deck for, as I recall, around $25.
Those were the days... I just checked StubHub. Similar seats for the OSU game v. Indiana in November? $250-300.
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