Picture this: You’re standing in the middle of Faurot Field, surrounded by 20,000 students clad in gold. It has rained all night long and everyone smells like damp sweat, but no one cares. As one gargantuan mob of Missouri humanity, the crowd leaps up and down as cries of “M-I-Z” are echoed across the field by answers of “Z-O-U.”
Down come the goal posts, and up go the cheers of triumph as the yellow beams make their way slowly out of the gates and out onto Stadium Boulevard. The ever-growing crowd begins its march to Harpo’s bar, where all of Columbia will sing fight songs until the sun comes up.
Sound like something worth experiencing?
That was the scene after the Homecoming football game last year, when Tigers fans rushed the field after an upstart Missouri Tigers team took down No. 1 Oklahoma. It is an event thousands of Missouri students will never forget, all because they made the simple decision to purchase a ticket.
There are a couple different ways to purchase a ticket. The most direct route is through MUTigers.com, where season ticket combos are on sale now. At $230, this might not seem like the cheapest avenue, but what it does provide is a guaranteed ticket to all home football games and most basketball games. So this way, you don’t have to pay a general admission to get in.
Even so, basketball tickets are not set in stone. While you’ll receive all of the tickets to football games at once, basketball season tickets are broken up in multiple pick-up dates. Because of the limited amount, you’ll find yourself lining up outside Mizzou Arena in the wee hours of the morning every couple of weeks just to make sure you get tickets for the next five games.
But don’t let that discourage you from the combo. The comfort of knowing you’ve already got a ticket with your name on it makes for a stress-free game day. Plus, you can always give your ID card to a friend in line, so they can pick up the tickets and you can sleep in.
But what if you don’t want to pull the trigger on buying the combo? Well, there’s always the Craigslist or Stubhub.com route. It makes more sense, though, to reach out to your friends on campus. There’s bound to be someone in your residence hall with an extra ticket, and an offer ranging from $20 to Flavor Blasted Goldfish could convince that person to trade.
The reoccurring theme here, of course, is money. No matter what, it will cost some quantity of cash to attend one of these events. And yet, what you’ll take away from these games will more than make up for what you put in.
As a freshman, it’s easy to feel like you’re lost in the crowd. There are a lot of unfamiliar faces, making it a little uncomfortable as you’re settling in. But the first Missouri football game of the year changes everything. The passionate atmosphere at Faurot Field creates such unity among the students, and there’s nothing quite like it. The same holds true at Mizzou Arena, when the crowd buzzes with electricity after a big basket.
At that moment, it doesn’t matter if the people around you aren’t familiar. You’re all in the same boat, cheering for the same outcome and for the same side. No other event on campus can bring the community together so powerfully.
That’s why it’s important to invest in tickets, even for the non-sports fans — because these games have as much to do with sports as they do with being a vital member of the MU community.
