↵ ↵
↵↵Oh, right, I do know quoi: fans. ↵
↵↵Treated to games like Wake Forest-Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech-Boston ↵College in Jacksonville, fans have turned on the TV and enjoyed a nice ↵nap in the middle of the third quarter instead of driving/flying ↵hundreds of miles to find out which ACC team gets to face Pittsburgh in ↵the BCS game everyone pretends doesn't exist. The thing has all the ↵atmosphere of the Humanitarian Bowl, without the Humanitarian Bowl's ↵excellent excuse. ("It's Boise in December," it says, "what do you ↵expect? At least I'm not named after a website.") ↵
↵↵And now you might get that lack of quoi everywhere else in the ACC. ↵
↵↵Virginia: ↵
↵↵⇥As of Friday, Virginia officials said current season-ticket sales ↵⇥for the upcoming slate are at 30,140, a drop of 14.6 percent from ↵⇥the same date in 2008. ↵↵
↵Florida State: ↵
↵↵⇥Florida State's season ticket numbers are down 13.4 percent from ↵⇥matching last year's total of 38,400 season tickets sold last year. ↵↵
↵Clemson (article ↵possesses oh-snap photo from the spring game displaying wholly empty ↵upper deck, to boot): ↵
↵↵⇥Clemson has experienced a 12 percent decline in season-ticket sales ↵⇥this season, which school officials pin almost exclusively on the ↵⇥nation's economic downturn. ↵↵
↵Elsewhere, N.C. State is down four to six percent, Virginia Tech had a ↵tougher time selling out than usual -- sales opened to the public -- and ↵Georgia Tech ... well, Tech fans went nuts after beating Georgia for the ↵first time in forever and ticket sales are up. The overall picture, ↵however, is well down. Notoriously fickle Miami fans are probably ↵defecting to Cuba as we speak. ↵
↵↵Though the ACC is far from alone here -- USF is down almost 20 percent and ↵even glamour schools like Michigan are offering season tickets to the ↵general public, if on a one-time basis -- I doubt there's going to be an increase in empty ↵seats at SEC and Big Ten games this fall. The prices people pay on the ↵secondary market will fall and schools will cut more deals to less ↵well-heeled donors, but the people will be there. The ACC, Big East, and ↵Pac-10, on the other hand, might have some embarrassing moments when the ↵camera pans the crowd only to find a confused exchange student trying to ↵get some peace and quiet after his roommate sent him into sexile. ↵
↵This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.