Every time the Red River Rivalry (Texas Longhorns vs. Oklahoma Sooners) football game is done in Dallas’ Cotton Bowl, there is always a neat divide in the middle (half clad in orange and half clad in red.) How do they address the issue of supply and demand, so that exactly 50% are Oklahoma and 50% are Texas fans?
What if there is much higher buying demand for one side than the other (what if, a No. 1 ranked Oklahoma goes up against an unranked Texas, and is widely expected to demolish Texas by six touchdowns, so that it is far likelier that Oklahoma fans would want to attend the game than Texas fans - do the game organizers have to artificially suppress Oklahoma fan ticket purchases and boost Texas fan purchases to achieve the 50/50 divide?)
I seriously doubt there is EVER a lack of demand for half of the stadium on the part of either set of supporters, regardless of how their team is playing that year. You must not realize what football means in Texas and “North Texas”.
What DSYoungEsq said. This game is sold out months in advance, and I don’t ever remember it not being sold out (I’m 57). It’s considered (by “important men”) the 3rd best rivalry in all of college football. Only behind The uhoh State-Michigan game, and the Army-Navy game.
Fun Fact, they’ve played their first game (1900) 7 years before Oklahoma was even a state! (1907)
For a little more down-and-dirty explanation, basically when there’s a bowl game or regular season game in some sort of novelty location(i.e. Dallas), most of the seats are allocated to the two schools- half on each side as you note. Some tiny amount can be held for general admission. Season ticket holders from each school get a shot at purchasing tickets through the school, so they’re drawing from the pre-allocated sections. ISTR that non season ticket holders can go through the school to buy bowl game tickets as well- you’ll be placed in the side appropriate for the school that you’re buying through.
Considering that big schools like UT and OU can fill more than half of a 85-100k seat stadium with season ticket holders during the regular season, it’s not unreasonable to assume that season ticket holders are going to snap up the majority of the pre-allocated seats early.
Cite: In-laws had UT season tickets for decades; that’s how they got their UT/OU game tickets. Note- even though they were season ticket holders, the novelty location tickets weren’t part of that deal, IIRC. Same thing for other schools- my father had season tickets for Texas A&M for about 20 years, and my uncle has had them since the 1980s. They would have had to get special tickets for the regular season games held in AT&T Stadium(JerryWorld) vs Arkansas too.
Eh… all heated college rivalries are the biggest ones around to the schools involved. It’s hard to argue that UT/OU is more hotly contested than say… Clemson/S. Carolina, or Alabama/Auburn, etc…
What makes them “bigger” is that in some of them, the teams are typically better, so there’s more riding on them- that’s why UT/OU has been so big for so long- both teams have historically been top tier programs for decades. Same with OSU/Michigan.
A rivalry that’s big enough transcends the possible actual result. Cal-Stanford invariably sells out, even in the prime days of Aaron Rodgers and Andrew Luck, when it was not so much a case of who would win but by how many touchdowns.
Besides, “who will win” is not always a sure thing - Stanford was 1-3 against Cal with John Elway as QB.
The factual answer is that both schools are issued the tickets for their side and sell them through their ticket offices. Demand is so high that special donor status is required to get a guaranteed ticket. Regular season ticket holders without that status go into a lottery to get the rest. Students also have an allocation.
Of course, people resell them all the time and so there are numerous small groups on the wrong side. It is actually a thing where those people will walk over to the other side and try to trade with similar but opposite people to get on the “right side”.
That’s very dependent on the school in question, and even the game. I know that for bowl games at my alma mater, season ticket holders basically had first right of refusal for tickets similar to their own- in other words, they had the option to buy bowl game tickets of the same quality. The donor status was what bought you the right to buy season tickets of a particular level.
So to describe it completely- if you wanted season tickets, you had to donate. Different donation levels granted you primacy and seat access. If you donated the minimum, you were getting a couple of end-zone corner seats high up. If you donated tens of thousands of dollars, you had the option for prime seats. And so on, with the highest donors having the option to get luxury boxes, etc…
Once that year’s bowl game came around, the prime seat people had the option to buy prime seats (or worse if they so chose) for that game, the cruddy seat people had the option to buy the best remaining seats (usually just as cruddy as their season tickets) Or none at all. Remaining seats are typically sold through the school’s ticket office in a first-come, first-served basis, and were almost always crap seats.
Not that I know anything else about this, but it’s worth knowing that for this particular bowl game, the location is approximately halfway between the two colleges - both are around 200 miles to Dallas.
The OP asked about a particular game between two particular schools. The answer I gave was for that question only. I wasn’t trying to answer generally.
For a long time Alabama-Auburn was played at neutral Legion field in Birmingham , the last game there was in 2000. Tickets were 50/50. When both schools expanded their stadiums they switched to home games.
