After lackluster Pac-12 Championship, no trouble selling Rose Bowl tickets for Stanford

Only 31,622 fans showed up in Palo Alto last week to see Stanford beat UCLA in the Pac-12 Championship Game. That is a fan support problem, right? Wrong. And the Cardinal are proving it this week, snapping up all 35,000 tickets available to them for the Rose Bowl in the first week they were on sale:

"The Rose Bowl is the Rose Bowl," Stanford ticket director Rich Muschell said Thursday. "People get pretty pumped up for that."

They certainly are pumped up on the Farm. This is their first trip to "The Granddaddy of Them All" since 2000, when they also played Wisconsin. This time around, the Cardinal are one of the best teams in the country and favorites to win in Pasadena, which has their fans excited.

There are two big differences between the Rose Bowl and the Pac-12 Championship Game, besides the former being the bigger game. One is the huge number of Stanford alums in Southern California, wealthy ones at that, who are all too happy to pay whatever the cost of a Rose Bowl ticket. The other is that the Pac-12 game was on a Friday night at 5 p.m. PT in soggy Palo Alto. On six days notice, the Cardinal were never going to sell a lot of tickets for that one, but the Rose Bowl, well, it's the Rose Bowl.