Oregon athletic director Rob Mullens said Friday the move to the Big Ten has bumped Ducks football season tickets back to the high levels they reached in the early 2010s and that Saturday’s top-five matchup against Ohio State could be called the biggest game ever played at Autzen Stadium.
The third-ranked Ducks host the second-ranked Buckeyes in their first matchup as Big Ten rivals, although it’s also a game fans have been waiting for since long before Oregon left the Pac-12.
“It’s one that people circled on their calendars when it was announced,” said Mullens, who is in his 15th season as AD at Oregon.
Mullen said earlier this week he asked 90-year-old associate athletic director Herb Yamanaka, who has been working at Oregon since 1959, where Saturday’s game would rank in terms of build-up and anticipation in program history.
“He said it’s the biggest he can remember,” Mullens said.
By the rankings, this will be the first top-five matchup played in Autzen. The last top-10 matchup was in 2022 against UCLA, but the last game that had this kind of build-up was also against a Big Ten team. Back in 2014, the third-ranked Ducks of the Pac-12 beat No. 7 Michigan State 46-27 behind eventual Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota.
Mullens said the move to the Big Ten in general has already had a tangible impact on the program.
“I think we first noticed, one from our fan base who are excited about these Big Ten opponents,” Mullens said. “We saw an incredibly high season ticket renewal rate. We sold, I think, over 11,000 new season tickets. So there was an incredible energy that took us back to (2012), ‘13, ‘14 years, where we were at (with) our season ticket level. So we returned to where we were when we were a perennial top-five team.”
Visiting fans are also gobbling up tickets to Oregon games at a much higher clip.
“In our previous conference, we wouldn’t come close to moving 3,000 (tickets). Our visitors are going to take 3,000 just about every conference game at Autzen this year. So that’s a change, right? Those are tickets that used to go back in the market for our fans that aren’t going to be there,” Mullens said.
Ohio State originally was scheduled to play at Oregon in a nonconference game in 2020, but it was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For many Ohio State fans, this trip has been in the works for a while.
“It’s a beautiful stadium and we were just dying to see it and so we figured we would take; it’s a pretty long trip for us from North Carolina, but it’s been worth it,” said Ohio State Jerome Glasser, who is from Charlotte, N.C.
