Should UGA season ticket holders be satisfied with a diet of cupcakes?

If you’re a Georgia football season ticket holder and you haven’t made your annual contribution to the Hartman Fund, better get down to the post office, go online or get on the horn to the Georgia Bulldog Club offices in Athens, because today’s the deadline. You can find out all the details here.

Contributions sent via snail mail must be postmarked no later than Feb. 15.

Even if you’re not going for season tickets, a minimum $100 contribution to the Hartman Fund will get you a 2012 football ticket application and will make you eligible to request single-game tickets to five of the seven home games. With the Dawgs looking to open the season as possibly a Top 5 team, some folks might want to scramble aboard the bandwagon.

Then again, whether you can find five home games on Georgia’s 2012 schedule that you consider worth the cost of the ticket plus a contribution is another question.

Along those lines, I had a note from reader SavannahDawg, who was going ahead and making his contribution but was grumbling about the 2012 home schedule, which admittedly isn’t that exciting: Buffalo, Florida Atlantic, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Ole Miss, Georgia Southern and Georgia Tech.

He complained that “the cupcake portion of that schedule is particularly lame. If sticking to an eight-game conference schedule in the expanded SEC means we have to give up playing Auburn every year just so we can keep the likes of the Florida Atlantic Owls coming to Athens for a paycheck, I’m going to be seriously rethinking my commitment to buying season tickets every year. Better to make a smaller donation and get single games, or even cherry-pick the best games on StubHub. Even paying scalper’s prices for those games, it’ll end up costing me less than season tickets when you factor in the Hartman Fund.”

SavanahDawg makes a valid point and I’m wondering if the SEC athletic directors’ aversion to adding a ninth conference game might not end up costing them financially down the road in terms of getting fans in the stands.

What do you think? Would a schedule that kept the cupcakes and lost Auburn as an annual opponent make you any less likely to buy tickets to games at Sanford Stadium?

Got something on your mind concerning UGA athletics or a question for the Junkyard Blawg? Send it to junkyardblawg@gmail.com.

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— Bill King, Junkyard Blawg