Hot Ticket?
USC-UCLA has always been a hot ticket, right? Well, from the first battle in 1929, up through 1975, the Coliseum was sold out only seven times for the crosstown rivalry. This year's game will be the fifth consecutive sell out in the series. The only longer capacity streak was seven, from 1985 through 1991.
I grew up in LA and it seems to me that in the sixties the Coliseum opened all seats, and most people didn't want those far, far end zone tix -- thus it didn't "sell out." But my memory may be incorrect. It would not be the first time.
Now there is a slight difference between a "sellout" and a "hot ticket". A sellout just means that the tickets were sold. A "hot ticket" for example was the Notre Dame v. USC Game (a very hard game to find a ticket).
My question is how many UCLA fans want to brave the Rose Bowl traffic to see USC beat UCLA for the 8th time in a row, and go to the National Championship Game...again for the 4th time. (There are tons of UCLA fans online trying to sell their seats for the game.)
The reason there were no sellouts from 1992 to 1998, at least, was because UCLA was beating SC teams (all poor except for the '95 Rose Bowl winning team), and Trojan fans did not want to put up with the Bruin fans' arrogance.