This opinion piece was written by a member of Her Campus at Mizzou.
“I just spent 200 dollars for absolutely nothing,” I complained to my friend while shopping in Trader Joe’s.
At that moment, I had no idea if I was getting tickets to the KU game, the one I was most excited to go to, and one of the main reasons I bought the Zou pass.
For a full 30 minutes, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to go to the game, the game that I’ve been waiting over a year for. My queue kept glitching, and the website kept saying that tickets were sold out, even if I could see that there were tickets available. After a long time of complaining and cursing Mizzou Athletics in the frozen meals aisle, I finally got a ticket, and I still don’t know how. I guess the Football Gods were just by my side.
Great, I got a ticket, so why am I still complaining?
I’m complaining because Mizzou overcomplicated the simplest process ever: you buy the student pass, you automatically get tickets for every game. And now, we aren’t even guaranteed an entry to them. I bought the pass because last year I went through so much trouble when trying to get tickets to each separate game. Turned out that getting the pass is giving me the same amount of trouble and has turned into a burden for all the pass holders.
The reason for that is the $250 million renovation of Faurot Field, which limited the number of seats for students. The construction is happening where the hill was located, which served as an overflow for the student section. And without a place to put those “extra” students, they can’t fit everyone in the stadium, which explains the limited tickets for students.
Basically, there isn’t enough space for students because of the construction, so not every student can go to the games. Everything makes sense, right? Wrong.
The problem with all of this is, if Mizzou Athletics knew that the hill was going to be under construction and student seating would be limited, why would they sell more passes than they could support?
Well, the answer is money. A big part of Athletics’ revenue comes from football ticket sales, and just in 2024, they made a little more than $19 million from that. So they obviously wanted to keep that revenue going, especially because they currently have a $15.2 million deficit, according to their financial report. From a business standpoint, that is completely understandable; they’ve got to minimize the losses that the renovation is causing them. From a fan, standpoint, it is baffling that they would do that without a single ounce of warning.
Another frustrating point is that the whole queue and ticket claiming fiasco was completely unknown to students until the first game of the season, against Central Arkansas. You could argue that we could’ve read the terms and conditions before buying the pass, but who actually does that?
The queue only lasted for two games, and after a lot of complaining from students, on Sept. 7, Mizzou Athletics sent out an email that the whole waiting in line for an hour without knowing if you’re going to get a ticket thing is finally over! Now you can enter a lottery and not know if you got your ticket until two days before the game! Yay!
This definitely made students even more upset. Even though they are looking for solutions and trying to make the process easier — which it did in a certain way — it just added more uncertainty to it, since we don’t know until the last minute if we got them or not. Keeping us from making alternate arrangements, such as buying general admission tickets.
This Monday, Sept. 15, was my first time using the lottery system, so I cannot give a personal opinion on it yet; however, it still seems like an odd way to claim the tickets, and it didn’t feel official at all. Now, I just have to wait until Wednesday to figure out if I got it or not.
At the end of the day, we just have to hang on until the end of the season. The renovation is set to be done in time for the 2026 season, which also doesn’t mean it is going to change much for the general student population, since most of the new additions to the stadium are premium seating, but that’s a point for another time.