Tramel's ScissorTales: Cowboys no longer needs OU, Texas to fill Boone Pickens Stadium
Berry TramelOklahoman
The Texas Longhorns trot onto the turf of Boone Pickens Stadium, perhaps for the last time, Saturday.
Soon enough, there will be no biennial Bevo visits. Probably no OU biennial visits, either, since Bedlam appears doomed by the Sooners’ and Longhorns’ exodus to the Southeastern Conference.
The marketers charged with filling the BooneDock must be shivering at their future task.
No Texas? No OU?
No problem.
Oh, it’s a problem. Selling tickets is a problem for every sport on every level. Every entertainment venue, be they movie houses or concert halls or athletic coliseums. Every business, every church, every everything. Why leave home when television or the internet or an Amazon truck will bring you what you need?
“It’s tough,” said Jesse Martin, OSU’s senior associate athletic director for external affairs. “It’s competitive out there for people’s time. We’re cognizant of that. Respectful of that.”
But OSU football attendance is spiking in the face of contemporary culture. Call it exquisite timing, with the OU/Texas departure.
A program that historically was not a big draw, much less an automatic sellout, has built up its fan base at just the right moment.
The OSU-Texas game is a sellout, the Cowboys’ third in a row at Boone Pickens Stadium. It’s not just the ‘Horns drawing a crowd. Don’t bust your buttons, Bevo. OSU sold out for Arkansas-Pine Bluff, too.
Mike Gundy’s football success, with help from Martin and his staff, have changed the culture in Stillwater. BPS is the place to be on autumn Saturdays, and that doesn’t figure to change even when the Big 12’s two big draws cast their lot with Dixie.
“Winning 10 games (a year) is a big deal,” Martin said. “We’re starting to get that culture. That culture has changed. I’ve been fortunate that my 16 years here have been the glory days. I think there’s a lot of people, younger than me, that’s all they know, that we win games here in Stillwater.”
When sparkling Boone Pickens Stadium, a virtual teardown from old Lewis Field, opened in 2009, the Georgia Bulldogs were the invited guest.
Zac Robinson, Dez Bryant, Russell Okung, Perrish Cox. Heck of an OSU team. Ranked ninth in the preseason Associated Press poll.
The game drew a school-record home crowd of 53,012. Seven thousand under capacity.
OSU did not have an automatic 50,000-at-every-game foundation. For decades, OSU crowds routinely were in the 40,000s or even 30,000s.
The athletic department has methodically built up that number. It’s been 12 years since a Cowboy crowd was under 50,000 – 48,284 for the 2010 Texas A&M game – and OSU has reached a level of confidence in knowing it doesn’t need OU or Texas to ignite ticket sales.
Then-OSU athletic director Mike Holder famously instituted a premium-game ticket policy in 2008.
In an effort to encourage season-ticket sales, OSU announced it would not sell individual-game tickets for Bedlam, in odd-numbered years, or for Texas, in even-numbered years.
Holder’s plan was widely criticized, but it worked. Season-ticket sales went up, the Cowboys started winning big and the policy was suspended only this year, for Texas, primarily because it’s Homecoming.
And OSU has gone full blast into stewardship of its fans, from promoting and facilitating a massive tailgating environment to stadium amenities to smoothing anything it can for fans coming to Stillwater.
“Somebody’s Game Day starts when they leave their driveway,” Martin said. “We put a lot of effort in what that Game Day experience is like.”
OSU’s goal, Martin said, is for fans to declare “man, that was easy,” after navigating parking or traffic. “We put a lot of effort into that.”
The Cowboys try to sell fun. Fun in the stadium. Fun outside the stadium. That’s the big push on social media, and tailgating is the ultimate example. The tailgating scene spreads all over campus but is centered near the stadium.
“It’s amazing,” Martin said. “It’s a big piece of this puzzle. When people come to a game, it’s not just a four-hour slot. They’re coming out spending all day here. You can feel that translate into the stadium.
And sure, the job of filling Boone Pickens will grow a little more difficult without OU and Texas. But the new look Big 12 will bring fresh meat like Brigham Young and Cincinnati, and the league’s sudden parity is making for great games and high drama.
“Will there be as an attractive draw without having Texas and OU? Probably not,” Gundy said. “OU’s the Bedlam draw, so that’s always going to sell out. And people love to watch Texas.
“It’s still going to be difficult to replace that part of what they (the Longhorns) bring to the table. Even when Mike Tyson was old and wasn’t as productive, everybody wanted to go watch him fight. They kind of carry that wherever they go.”
Boone Pickens was reconfigured in 2019 to a capacity of 55,509, wisely making way for more premium seating and fan comforts.
From 2017-19, OSU had nine sellouts. Then the pandemic hit, and when stadiums returned to full capacity in 2021, some fans all over America were a little slow to return.
But now the Cowboys are back in the sellout business. At just the right time.
“We have a great fanbase, we have a great game-day atmosphere. Right now, we’re getting people to buy season tickets. Recently, it feels like there has been a wave coming.”
