Last weekend, the highly anticipated college football matchup between Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin broke the record for the most expensive regular season football tickets in history. The decades-old Lone Star rivalry was played at Kyle Field, which boasts a capacity of well over 100,000, in College Station, Texas.
The University of Texas ended up taking the win over Texas A&M with a final score of 17-7 last Saturday night. The monumental win further solidified the strong season the Longhorns have had, making them the number two-ranked team in college football.
The game was so sought after that the average ticket price pushed above $1,000. Despite the exorbitant cost of attending the game, fans of college football poured into the stadium to cheer on their respective Texas football team. TickPick reported on the ticket prices on X, writing, “🚨 BREAKING 🚨 Texas A&M vs Texas this Saturday is the most expensive regular season football ticket (NFL and CFB) on record. Current get-in: $741 Average Purchase Price: $1,079.”
Sports and business commentator Joe Pompliano weighed in on the matter, posting on X, “It’ll cost you over $850 to get into tonight’s Texas vs. Texas A&M game. Even the nosebleeds (!!) are going for $1,000. This is on pace to be the most expensive regular season college football game of all time. Pure insanity.” Further commenting that the prices are not driven by a supply constraint, he noted, “It’s also worth mentioning that this isn’t necessarily a supply issue. Kyle Field (at Texas A&M) can seat over 100,000. It’s the largest stadium in the SEC and the fourth-largest stadium in the entire United States.”
One user claimed the high prices are the result of third-party companies selling the tickets. “It’s all because in the USA venues/official websites are allowed to (re)sell tickets at prices above official prices. In Europe, tickets have a fixed price for every seat in the same area. There’s no ‘ticket inflation’ supported or encouraged by official websites,” they said.
Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko weighed in on the sky-high ticket prices in a pre-game interview stating the cost matches the demand to see the game with their rival from Austin. “I just know they’re really high,” Elko said. “Yeah, I think when I got hired, and you knew this was going to be last weekend of the year, there was an expectation that this would be a really tough ticket.”
“As the year has gone on, and they’ve had the year that we’ve had, and we’ve had the year that we’ve had, kind of felt like it was going to be a tougher ticket,” the coach continued. “Now that it’s game day, prime time for a shot in Atlanta, I think the ticket prices would probably match the demand to get in the building. And I expect our guys, that I know our 12th man will show up. I know they’ll hold on to those tickets regardless of what anybody asks for, and that we protect them and we fill this place with Aggies and we make this Kyle Field the way we know it to be.”
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Watch Sen. Steve Daines explain how the “Redskins” logo may be uncanceled below:
Featured image credit: Janreagan at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kyle_Field_Panorama.jpg