Still have a bad taste in your mouth from not getting any Sugar Bowl tickets over the holidays? I don’t blame you.
Ten people had to sue the University of Illinois for tickets promised to them because it reneged on their agreement. Certain newspaper ads even deceived unsuspecting fans out of money.
It’s all upsetting and something needs to be done soon. Not only does this fiasco make the future uncertain for LSU fans traveling to bowl games, it also clouds the sky for other schools around the country that will surely face this problem when their team goes to a major bowl game.
While solutions to keep everyone happy may seem few and far between, it doesn’t take a physics student to realize who’s getting the raw deal in all of this. If the bowl directors were smart, they’d find a way to put more tickets aside for students to watch the teams play.
Illinois and LSU each got 15,000 tickets of the Superdome’s 77,688 to hand out as they pleased. LSU students only got 2,000 of those seats, or less than 3 percent. And when some students tried to find an alternative way to see the game, many got the shaft.
If students can’t get tickets from either university, where else can they turn? What about the other Sugar Bowl tickets not given to the two schools?
According to a bowl official, the remaining 37,688 Sugar Bowl tickets were distributed to the general public, Sugar Bowl season ticket holders (who purchased three and four-year ticket plans in advance), Bowl Championship Series members and Sugar Bowl sponsors such as Nokia.
What’s that all about? Fifty percent of all the Superdome tickets were put aside for a group that included Nokia and BCS big shots and not Tiger or Illini fans. How is that fair?
It’s not and I’ll tell you why. The top Nokia executives don’t care who’s crowned the Sugar Bowl champion; they’ve already made their money by sponsoring the bowl.
Why do these millionaires get to sit in nice seats while die-hard fans have to stand in line for days or take a university to court for a few end zone seats? It’s ridiculous and there needs to be a new game plan when it comes to dishing out seats for future bowl games.
Students should be the ones at the game (okay, maybe not in those big suites that serve free alcohol), and we should be able to have more than just a couple of thousand fans in the stands for our biggest game of the year.
The only alternative is to risk buying tickets at outrageous prices from people fortunate enough to have connections in this town. But what good is going to a bowl game if students have to blow a semester’s worth of tuition on tickets that cost as much as a Barnes & Noble textbook?
I say we boot the executives and let more loyal fans have a chance to watch their team play in a bowl. If kicking the suits out means more tickets will go to students to enjoy, let’s do it.