The season that many people are saying no one could have predicted created a high demand for the hottest ticket in town.
While the LSU football team prepared for its first National Championship game since 1958, many students waited anxiously, with fingers crossed, hoping that they would be among the lucky ones selected in the Nokia Sugar Bowl student ticket lottery.
Out of the 16,000 tickets the the Athletic Department received, an allotment of 2,000 was set aside for the students, to be given away in a lottery drawing.
Of the 4,600 students to apply for Sugar Bowl tickets, the winners had to go to the Superdome the day of the game to claim their tickets. Instead of getting them ahead of time, as they did for the SEC Championship game, students could not pick up their tickets until 9 a.m. the day of the game.
“We wanted to eliminate any types of scalping,” said Brian Broussard, LSU Ticket Manager.
Broussard said that the Ticket Office received a number of complaints regarding students selling their SEC Championship tickets, preventing “more deserving” students from going to the game.
According to Broussard, non-students were able to buy student tickets to the SEC Championship game through scalpers.
“We wanted to make sure students were at this game,” said Broussard.
Because of the high number of requests, many students were not able to attend the Sugar Bowl.
James Goeders, a chemistry junior, said that although he did not receive tickets, this system is better than the one used for the SEC Championship game.
“I think it is the best option LSU could use,” Goeders said. “I liked the national championship way better than the SEC Championship way, forcing each ticket to only be used by that student.”
The system of having students pick up the tickets at the stadium is also practiced at other universities.
The University of Georgia, who played against LSU for the SEC Championship, has used this system for years.
Freddie Jones, associate athletic director and head of Ticket Operations at the University of Georgia, said he believes by picking up the tickets at the gate, more students are prevented from scalping tickets.
“I don’t believe there is any way the University of Georgia or LSU could prevent anyone from scalping,” Jones said, “But this makes it harder for them to do it.”
One concern that some students had was the number of student tickets available.
Stephanie Condrey, a mass communication sophomore, said the Ticket Office should have set aside more tickets for students.
“It should have been a larger number of tickets,” Condrey said.
Jones disagrees with this complaint, stating that most universities only set aside 10 percent of tickets to the students.
“LSU was very generous and very fair with the student ticket allotment,” said Jones. “There is no way possible the Ticket Office can take care of everyone wanting tickets.”
Broussard said he was pleased with the outcome of the student ticket system, and that this system will be used in the future for LSU football bowl tickets.
“Pretty much every student picked up their ticket,” said Broussard. “We only had 10 or 15 who didn’t pick it up. Overall, we thought everything went well at the game.”