Friday’s 23-17 victory over Kansas State was the end of the beginning for UA coach Brent Brennan. Survive and advance, right?
Now comes Act II, which includes filling all of those empty seats at Arizona Stadium.
The UA listed Friday’s attendance at 40,051, which surely included about 8,000 to 10,000 no-shows. That’s not unexpected when a non-traditional football school like Arizona, coming off a flat 4-8 season and uninspiring victories over two puffball opponents, plays on a hot Friday night. The director of FOX’s telecast surely instructed the cameramen not to take wide-screen views of the stadium, which would expose about 20,000 empty seats. I don’t recall a single panoramic view of the stadium, which is common during a broadcast of say, an Oregon-Washington game or an Alabama-LSU showdown.
Don’t give the viewing audience a reason to yawn. Let the game speak for itself, which it did. The UA played with force and at times appeared to be of Top 25 quality.
A couple of young fans celebrate their haul, several game worn gloves tossed into the stands as the Arizona Wildcats left the field after their 23-17 win over Kansas State, Sept. 12, 2025, in Tucson.
The irony of the Arizona-KSU game was that on a cold December night in 1993, about 25,000 Kansas State fans traveled hundreds of miles to Arizona Stadium for the Copper Bowl, a game that drew an all-time Copper Bowl record 49,075 fans. It marked the beginning of three decades of winning football at KSU, which had been college football’s biggest loser of the 1980s. If you think Arizona can match KSU’s football history, think again.
Since that night at the ’93 Copper Bowl, KSU has won 246 games, Arizona 177. KSU has finished 14 seasons ranked in the AP Top 25. Arizona? Four.
Now the Wildcats, using their seventh head coach since 1993, are once again fighting back, climbing from ground zero, trying to fill a stadium whose capacity has been reduced from 58,000 to 50,000, and still struggling to sell tickets the way KSU does (KSU sold out 39 consecutive games from 2012-17). Alas, Arizona has only sold out five games since 2015, once against ASU, and single games against Utah, Oregon, Washington and BYU.
On Friday, my long-time friend and golfing partner Walter Rice, a retired Raytheon official who graduated from Arizona in the ’70s, attended his first UA football game, he says, since the Tom Tunnicliffe days of the early 1980s. I asked about his game-day experience. He sat immediately underneath the press box, a long walk, 75 rows from the field.
“The stadium is impressive,” Rice said. “The crowd for an early Friday game was not very large, which made parking and entry to the Sixth Street garage very easy.
“Everyone around us was enthusiastic and supporting the Cats. The price for a couple of hot dogs and sodas was reasonable. But the long wait for TV commercials and reviews of plays by officials was frustrating at times.”
Would you consider returning to Arizona Stadium this season?
“While it was fun to watch the game surrounded by fans,” Rice said, “I prefer watching the game at home.”
By comparison, KSU over-sold its first two home games (against low-brow opponents North Dakota and Army), with crowds of 51,927 and 52,723 in the 50,000 Snyder Family Stadium.
College football isn’t predictable. Who would’ve thought remote Manhattan, Kansas, would be more of a football town than Tucson?
What’s next? The meat of Arizona’s home schedule remains, with games against Oklahoma State, BYU, Kansas and Baylor, all of which seem winnable after Friday’s show of force against Kansas State.
A more challenging assignment may be for Tucsonans to fill all those empty seats.
