A Call To Dawgs: Arizona State-Georgia, 9/20/08

This is your formal invitation to West Coast Dawgapalooza 2008, otherwise known as the Arizona State-Georgia game on Saturday September 20. It's only 5 1/2 months away, so start sifting through the couch cushions for that spare change. I am locked and loaded: flight, hotel, car, tickets, the whole nine, so I thought I'd share some info for anyone who still has plannin' to do.

Here's what you need to know:

Flights
Kayak.com is the best flight search engine that I am aware of. Rock it.

Orientation
Here's a Google map of the Tempe area to get you acclimated. Zoom in, zoom out, and cruise around to figure out the lay of the land in and around ASU & Tempe.

Hotels
Trip Advisor is the best hotel site going. Here is a list of the 45 hotels in Tempe ranked according to user reviews; it is a great place to start your hotel search, as you can read several traveler reviews in addition to the usual info. This is the best resource I can recommend for finding a hotel in Tempe.

Of course, you can also stay north of the river in Scottsdale, but it's definitely a higher pricepoint. Here's the trip advisor list & ranking of Scottsdale hotels.

If your into the staying with the team thing, the UGA football team is staying at the Marriott Phoenix Airport {ranked 41 of 158 hotels in Phoenix by tripadvisor}, and rooms are currently available for $139 a night.

Tickets
Thanks to the work of Paul Westerdawg, we have found out the deal with tickets from the ASU ticket office office

ASU single game tickets go on sale August 13th.

ASU season tickets are on sale now {more on why this is important in a minute}.

First off, here is the Sun Devil Stadium seating plan for reference:

- The UGA section {the tickets that UGA will be selling to it’s own fans through the UGA ticket office} for this game will be sections 231-236.

-You can buy, today, any seat in sections 212-230 for $99 for a season ticket.

Let me repeat that: for $99, you can buy, right now, an ASU 2008 season ticket for all 7 home games. Last year face value on these tickets was $42 per game. So you can buy $320 worth of face value tickets for $99.

This is amazing because:

1. You will have ticket in hand

2. If you buy in section 230, you will be adjacent to the official UGA sections, and with the number of UGA fans going out I am willing to bet that section 230 is going to be much more red and black than gold and maroon.

3. With your ticket to the other 6 games, you can either:

3a. Attempt to sell them, on your own, on Craigslist, Stubhub, Ebay etc. You could sell them for way below face and make up the approximately $50 above a single ticket face value that you paid for your ASU-UGA ticket

3b. The ASU ticket office told me that you can return any of the tickets that you don’t plan on using, and each year they donate those tickets to charity {last year it was Boys & Girls Club of Tempe/Phoenix} and will provide you with a receipt of your contribution that can be used as a tax writeoff.

4. Note also that if you want better seats and aren't as worried about proximity to the UGA section, sideline tickets in sections 201-211 with seatbacks start at $149 for a season ticket. Also, with the $99 tickets in sections 212-230, note that sections 222-226 have seatbacks although they are a little farther away from the UGA section.

I have purchased my tickets in section 230. My recommendation is to call ASU ticket office and get your tickets in section 230. The ASU ticket office is open Monday- Friday from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. PST. Their phone number is 480-727-0000, and this season ticket deal can only be purchased by phone {you can't get it on line}

Think of it this way:

Why wait until August 13 to pay $45-50 for a seat which could be who knows where in the stadium when today you can buy a seat adjacent to the UGA section, for $50 more?. And with that $50 more, you are getting about $250 more worth of tickets to the other 6 games that you can either sell to get your money back {and if things work out you could end up going to ASU-UGA for free, or even getting paid to go}, or you can give back to the school, donate to charity, and get a $250 tax writeoff?

This is a no brainer.

The UGA ticket office has not announced a point total cutoff for season ticket holders to purchase the tickets that UGA has in sections 231-236, but everyone thinks that they will get more requests than the total number of tickets they have and that they point total cutoff will be significant- the buzz is that it will be at or above the point cutoff for Georgia/Florida road game against a good opponent tickets {20,000 - 30,000 points}.

Tailgating
Note that for some unknown reasons that are alien to the average SEC fan, tailgaiting is NOT allowed in university "parking lots and structures" until 3.5 hours before kickoff, and although public consumption of beer and wine is legal, public consumption of hard liquor is not. No, I am not kidding. Don't ask, because I have no fucking idea, either. Not sure yet how to work around this yet; maybe just rock the bars and then walk to the stadium; not sure at this point but we'll figure it out. But if you are planning on setting up your tailgate early in the a.m., it looks like that isn't happening. I know: weak sauce.

Golf
Golf Arizona
Metro Phoenix Golf Guide

That's all I can think of. I am beyond geeked about this for more than just the game and the fact that several friends are flying out. I also took the week after the game off work, and I'm renting a car and leaving Phoenix on Sunday to explore Grand Canyon, Zion, and Bryce Canyon National Parks for a week, then driving to Vegas the following Sunday and flying home from there.

So there's all the information you need to make it happen. First beer is on me.