By: Doug Lesmerises (Clevelannd Plain Dealer) — COLUMBUS, Ohio — The tailgaters weren’t as plentiful at Ohio Stadium last week, the crowd a little later filling the stands.

So as Ohio State started pulling away from Minnesota in the second half, nobody was rooting harder for the Buckeyes than Bill Jones. He’s the guy who had tickets to sell for Saturday’s game against New Mexico State.

“With the economic climate, and the Purdue loss, you never know what to expect,” said Jones, who oversees the ticket office as Ohio State’s associate athletic director for external affairs. “So I was thinking, ‘Beat them by 70 and we’ll wash away that bad taste after the Purdue loss.’ I never want to run it up on anybody, but I wanted us to have a good showing.”

Jones had to make do with a 31-point win, and there’s a chance that Ohio Stadium won’t be sold out for Saturday’s noon kickoff with a 3-5 team from the Western Athletic Conference. Ohio State ranks third in the nation in attendance this season, averaging 105,331 fans, one of 19 schools to draw more than 100 percent of its stadium’s listed capacity. (New Mexico State ranks 106th in the country, averaging 17,458 fans per home game.)

But a nonconference game this late in the season against the seventh-place WAC team is just about the toughest sell the Buckeyes could face in trying to fill at least 102,329 seats.

“You had to find someone who could fit perfectly into Oct. 31, 2009, and that was hard to do,” Ohio State coach Jim Tressel said of scheduling the Aggies. “So we’re grateful for the fact that we could find a game, most especially we could find a home game, because that’s critical for our athletic department. So we’re not going to say we wish it were a different way. We’re just going to go to work against the Aggies.”

It’s not as if there’s a huge sellout streak on the line, like Nebraska’s NCAA record of 302 straight sellouts in a stadium whose current capacity is just over 81,000. Notre Dame is second with 210 consecutive sellouts. Ohio State is on a 17-game sellout streak dating back to the Akron game of 2007. Jones said for that game, as for this one, the opponent returned a sizeable chunk of its tickets about two weeks before the game.

This time, Jones said New Mexico State was given 4,000 tickets as part of the contract that will pay the Aggies $850,000 for coming to Ohio Stadium. The school gave nearly 3,400 of those tickets back to Ohio State, but not before running ads on a Columbus sports-talk radio station trying to get Ohio State fans to purchase seats by calling Las Cruces, N.M. Those seats are currently available at ohiostatebuckeyes.com.

“We’re hoping to go through all of them,” Jones said. “We’re batting around some ideas to put them to good use if they don’t get sold.”

This is Ohio State’s fourth game against a WAC team, the last against San Jose State in 2002.

Games like this will be less of an issue in the future, at least at this point in the schedule. Starting in 2010, the Big Ten is expanding its season by one week, pushing the last game until after Thanksgiving and building an off week into the schedule. So in 2010 and 2012, all four of Ohio State’s nonconference games will be played before the Big Ten season. Filling a schedule early in the year provides more options than squeezing a game into the middle of the conference season.

In 2011, an opponent for Oct. 15 has not get been determined.

As for the overall affect of the economy on Ohio State tickets, Jones said he has seen it primarily in Ohio State fans going to away games. Big Ten teams often are happy to provide as many tickets as possible to Ohio State, with the Buckeyes typically filling an order for 6,000 tickets for a road game at Indiana. This season, Jones said the Buckeyes didn’t sell 4,000 tickets for road games at either Indiana or Purdue for the first time he could remember.

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