Bill Haisten: No Bedlam, no Texas and no problem for Oklahoma State
- Aug 1, 2024 Updated Aug 1, 2024
Bill Haisten
Tulsa World Sports Columnist & Writer
At Iowa State in 2007, there was athletic director Jamie Pollard’s introduction of a new football season-ticket policy.
One Cyclone home football game would be designated as the premium game on the schedule. Iowa State fans could attend that game only if they had purchased a season ticket.
The result was a striking 19% increase. The 2006 total had been 30,728. The 2007 total was 36,606. For the 2004 Cyclone season, the season-ticket sales total had been less than 23,000.
Iowa State officials were impressed by the 2007 spike in sales and revenue, and so was one of Pollard’s Big 12 Conference colleagues — then-Oklahoma State athletic director Mike Holder, who decided to borrow the Iowa State model.
Before the 2008 season, OSU activated its own premium-game ticket policy. In any season that included OU on the Boone Pickens Stadium schedule, Bedlam was the premium game. On non-Bedlam home schedules, Texas typically would be the premium-game opponent.
In 2023, for the first time in school history, Oklahoma State sold out on all football season tickets before the start of the season. There no longer is a Bedlam or Texas game on the home schedule, but OSU again has sold out all season tickets for this year’s six games at Boone Pickens Stadium.
Daniel Shular, Tulsa World Archive
The combination of sustained Cowboy winning, the annual sellout status on 123 stadium luxury suites and Holder’s season-ticket policy elevated OSU to previously unimaginable levels on football revenue.
For the 2006 season, Oklahoma State sold only 32,903 football season tickets. The 2007 total was 33,400.
After Holder’s policy took effect, the totals were 39,476 in 2008 and 45,952 in 2009. In 2013 and 2017, OSU surpassed the 50,000 mark.
As renovations resulted in a reduction of the stadium’s capacity, there may never again be a 50,000 milestone. This year’s capacity is 52,000. The season opens with OSU’s Aug. 31 hosting of two-time defending FCS champion South Dakota State.
The 2023 OSU home schedule included the final clash of the Cowboys and Sooners as conference rivals. The premium policy was enforced. For the first time in OSU history, football season tickets were sold out before the opening game.
It’ll be a while — and maybe a really long while – before OU or Texas is on an Oklahoma State home football schedule, and still the OSU athletic department is celebrating another preseason sellout of football season tickets.
All 2024 season tickets have been sold. Within a few more days, the remaining single-game tickets will be gone.
Here’s an under-the-radar piece of the story: For the first time since 2007, there was no premium-game policy on OSU football tickets. Holder was the athletic director in 2005-21, and he always hoped for a time when OSU fans would become so conditioned to purchasing football season tickets that the policy would not be necessary.
That time is now, and the 2024 ticket-sales triumph becomes another layer of the ongoing “OSU has become a football school” process.
Oklahoma State’s premium-game policy may be used again at some point, but for now, athletic director Chad Weiberg told the Tulsa World, it isn’t necessary.
“Right now, we don’t feel like we need it,” Weiberg said. “Here we are — we’re going to sell out before the season kicks (off).”
The Cowboys’ five additional 2024 home-game opponents are Arkansas (Sept. 7) and, in Big 12 play, Utah (Sept. 21), West Virginia (Oct. 5), Arizona State (Nov. 2) and Texas Tech (Nov. 23).
The 2008 Bedlam game matched an 11th-ranked Cowboy team with the third-ranked Sooners at Boone Pickens Stadium. The stakes were high for a prime-time, nationally televised showdown, and yet there was nearly as much talk during the week about Holder’s ticket policy as there was about the game itself.
From both sides of the rivalry, Holder was inundated with protests. OU had been given an allotment of 5,000 tickets, each of which was priced at $100. If you weren’t the bearer of one of those, you weren’t admitted unless your Bedlam ticket was part of an OSU season-ticket package.
To Cowboy and Sooner fans, and in spite of Bedlam having been the final game of the regular season, OSU actually sold a few season tickets that week. The game attendance wound up being 49,031. OSU’s 2008 home games against Troy, Baylor and Texas A&M drew bigger crowds.
“It’s not about just this game. It’s about our future,” Holder told the Tulsa World before the 2008 Bedlam game. “(OSU fans who) are on the fence for season tickets, we need to get them to buy in and get with the program on a season-ticket basis.”
Because Holder’s policy coincided with the golden age of OSU football, attendance and revenue have remained consistently strong.
“Our rationale was the same as Oklahoma State’s,” Pollard told the Tulsa World years ago. “If you do the same thing that you’ve always done, you get the same results that you’ve always gotten.”
Holder rolled the dice on something different and initially unpopular. It changed the Oklahoma State people’s mind-set on ticket-buying and being in Stillwater for every home football game.
Except for the COVID-impacted season of 2020, there was for each of the last 14 OSU seasons a home-attendance average of no less than 50,812. In eight of those seasons, the average was at least 54,000.
No Bedlam.
No Texas.
No problem.
The Cowboy program can lose the arch-rival Sooners and the Longhorns from future schedules and still expect to pack the stadium each week.
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