Nearly 33,000 University fans requested tickets in the off-season for Saturday’s blockbuster showdown between the Tigers and the Crimson Tide.
Despite the unprecedented demand, about 40 University fans were able to buy tickets from the Ticket Office officials around kickoff in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
Brian Broussard, LSU director of ticket operations, said the Athletic Department had extra player comp tickets that were still unclaimed moments before the game began.
“[The tickets] were accounted for going into kickoff, and then I don’t know why people wouldn’t come,” he said.
For every game, Broussard said, each player is allowed to request four complimentary tickets that usually go to players’ families.
To help fill the University’s designated sections in Bryant-Denny Stadium, University Ticket Office members sought out purple-and-gold-clad fans outside the stadium to sell the tickets for their face value of $55.
“We had extra tickets; otherwise they’d go unused,” Broussard said. “So we figured it’d be better to try to get our own people in the game … The number of fans outside looking for tickets after kickoff – it’s never what we had this past week.”
Broussard said it’s rare that number of player comp tickets are not picked up, which is why the tickets were able to be offered at the last minute to fans.
“It’s happened before, but it’s never something that happens every week,” he said.
The late ticket availability came as a surprise to Tiger fans who made the five hour drive to Tuscaloosa without tickets.
“I was going just hoping to buy a ticket there,” an LSU fan, who wished to remain anonymous, said Monday. “We were at the stadium just kind of walking around looking for people – we didn’t have our hands up or anything. And one of the athletic [officials] walked up and just kind of said, ‘Hey, are y’all looking for tickets?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I have tickets y’all can buy if you want to go in now. I’ll sell them to you for face value.'”
The LSU Athletic Department announced in June that the number of road tickets requested for the LSU-Alabama game, which was the first meeting between LSU coach Les Miles and former LSU coach Nick Saban, shattered the previous record. The old benchmark occurred in 2006 when fans requested 14,000 tickets for LSU’s road game against Tennessee.
——-Contact Kyle Whitfield at [email protected]