If you want a ticket to a football game at most Division 1 schools, you need to be prepared to pay up for a pass, wait in line or desperately refresh, hoping you’ll finish first in a crowded digital race.
While it’s not perfect, I believe the University of South Carolina has a great and fair system in place that takes away most of the stress of getting football tickets. But, before we get into the details, why not look at the systems in other Southeastern Conference schools?
The great state of Mississippi provides two perfect examples of schools’ nickel and diming their students. Ole Miss offers the privilege of a limited allotment of $175 season tickets, only available after you graciously donate an additional $75, while Mississippi State sells a similarly limited $199 pass to, as the website says, “support the Bulldogs as they compete in the toughest conference in the nation.”
However, everything is bigger in Texas. In Austin, the “Big Ticket” comes in at an appropriately grand price of $270, while Texas A&M provides a yell-worthy steal at just $400, with the option of a guest ticket each game raising the price to $925.
Missouri, Tennessee and LSU almost get it right, but not quite. LSU has a loyalty point system, but it’s to earn the right to buy tickets to high-demand postseason games, a situation I can admit we don’t typically encounter. Missouri and Tennessee have loyalty point systems, but only for the right to purchase a ticket each home game.
Vanderbilt tickets are free but considering the program won five SEC games in five years prior to 2025, they should be free.
Here, the most reliable way to get a football ticket, for no additional cost, is taking some time to support any one of our other sports teams, like volleyball, soccer and swim, with extra points if it’s against Clemson. In a key difference from some other schools, access to this system doesn’t sell out, every full-time student can sign up for the system at any time.
Cockpit Rewards has a queue that can get crowded, especially when tickets first come available, but being the first to put in a request doesn’t actually matter. You can submit a request whenever you’d like before the deadline, and whether you were first or last, your shot at a ticket comes down to points.
The system accounts for one issue that's always popular on our modern-day town forum YikYak: seniority. Freshman start with three points, sophomores get four, juniors and graduate students get six and seniors begin the year with eight.
Those points are before the additional 10% of points that rollover from the previous year, providing a valuable additional boost to any upperclassmen that attended every football game last year. If you were frequently in the building to see, for example, our elite women’s basketball team, you start off with even more points.
Encouraging students to attend other on-campus games to earn football tickets is our system’s best feature. Sports that otherwise might see low attendance get lines that go outside the building.
The only issue I can think of with the system is the nearly-as-large line of people leaving at halftime. I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I’m not calling for the leave-at-halftime rule to be changed, but I do think we could do a bit better as a student body about staying in our seats the whole game.
Imagine if you were giving a presentation you’d spent weeks or even months preparing for, and in the middle of it, most of the class got up, started talking and got out as soon as possible. It wouldn’t be a good feeling, and I can’t imagine it feels too great for a Gamecock athlete to see a big halftime exodus in the middle of a competitive matchup.
With students’ widely varying academic and work schedules, is this a totally, 100% fair system? No, I won’t say that, but it’s about as close as we can possibly get. Expensive passes certainly wouldn’t boost equity.
To address the other elephant in the room, I won’t passionately defend the $300 athletics fee. It’s a great example of something that’s “complimentary" being baked into other costs.
However, our price remains competitive compared to schools like A&M, especially when people are demanding higher-and-higher NIL budgets every year. I don’t like the athletics fee, but can’t entirely blame USC for maintaining it.
As for people being irritated when they don’t get a ticket, my response is simple: if you care, it really isn’t that hard.
On a personal level, I got lowers for every game last year just from attending football games. If you’re a senior and go to the games each week, you should get a lower. If you’re requesting a ticket the first time that season for the last game of year, it can be tough.
While on the topic of lowers, we should keep them full the whole game. If it’s a blowout loss in pouring rain, fine, but otherwise, you should stay for the whole game you requested a ticket for. It’s as simple as that.
Last year was rough, but judging by Shane Beamer’s track record following a bad season, this year will be successful and "LaHeisman" will return to elite form. Remember to request those tickets.