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FARGO — The North Dakota State ticket office opened its own portal of sorts this week for the Bison and University of Colorado football game this fall. It’s taking requests for its allotment of seats and the number comes with a restriction in hopes of getting more fans a chance at making the trip.
The CU athletic department allotted NDSU 2,500 tickets, with the Bison ticket office taking requests through April 30. Each account will have a maximum order of six tickets.
“Just to try and spread the love as much as we can,” said Derrick Lang, the executive director of Team Makers booster group.
The 2,500 is well above the normal Missouri Valley Football Conference team-compensated tickets of around 200. That number also comes at a time when attendance and attraction to CU football is at a peak with head coach Deion Sanders.
Add to that it’s a rare matchup with an FBS program for NDSU and Lang anticipates not having too much trouble filling the 2,500. Team Makers is already in the process of organizing a fan charter flight to Denver.
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When NDSU and CU signed the contract for the game in 2016, the Buffaloes were 10-4 that season but afterward went on a downward spiral. That changed, at least in popularity of the program, with the hiring of Sanders, whose personality has captivated the college football world the last couple of seasons.
“Obviously the dynamics of the game have changed significantly with Deion being there,” Lang said. “It seems like there’s a lot of buzz around it.”
NDSU was allotted 2,600 tickets for its 2022 game at the University of Arizona, its last FBS matchup. A highly anticipated 2020 matchup at the University of Oregon was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic and rescheduled for 2028 — the next scheduled FBS game for the Bison.
Lang said the NDSU athletic department had plans to limit the maximum order at the 2020 Oregon game to six per account. The rarity of playing notable Power Five programs like Colorado will most likely only add to the anticipation for the game.
“I would compare this to when we were going to play Oregon,” Lang said. “Unfortunately that didn’t happen but I think people have had this circled on their calendar for a long time. The number of people that told me months ago that, hey, I have my flight scheduled, it seems like there’s been a lot of excitement.”
The game is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, Aug. 31, but television rights could dictate a change to either Thursday or Friday.
“Obviously we’re at the mercy of television right now from what we’ve been told,” Lang said. “I’ve been trying to communicate with people to sit tight.”
NDSU will use its traditional priority points system in determining the pecking order of getting CU tickets. It’s a policy that started with NDSU’s trips to the FCS national title game in Frisco, Texas, starting in 2011.
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“Same as it’s always been, very similar to how we’ve handled the Frisco ticket allotment,” Lang said.
NDSU’s tickets for the CU game are $95 each with fans being seated in sections 101 and 102, which at Folsom Field are situated in the northeast corner next to its end zone athletic complex. Like Frisco, Texas, games and other venues that anticipate a sellout, tickets are often available on secondary market sites.
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