Residents in Houston had a tough decision about how to spend their entertainment dollar on Friday: Attend the Texas Bowl between the Syracuse Orange and the Minnesota Golden Gophers or throw a penny into a fountain and make a wish.
The argument against the college bowl system having so many postseason games (35 in 2013) picked up another argument, according to a report on Extramustard.SI.com, which stated that just minutes before the start of the Texas Bowl, tickets for the game had dropped to one cent on StubHub.com.
The price of the ticket in the 71,500-seat Reliant Stadium was a whopping 75 cents on StubHub on Wednesday, according to the report. About 20 minutes before the 6 p.m. EST kickoff, the priced dropped 67 percent to a quarter.
A few minutes before the game, anyone with a penny could've gone.
The game had a reported attendance of 32,327, but that figure is misleading. Included in the ticket sales are an allotment of 12,000 tickets to each team. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that the Gophers had sold 3,375 of its allotted tickets. It didn't have a ticket told for Syracuse but said that the kickoff luncheon on Thursday had Minnesota fans far outnumbering Syracuse fans.
The Star Tribune added that last year's Texas Bowl had an attendance of 50,386. The newspaper reported that the Texas Bowl is part of the package for Houston Texans season-ticket holders. Last year, Minnesota played a Texas school, Texas Tech, which the Star Tribune surmised was the reason for the disparity in attendance for the two editions of the Texas Bowl.
The most ironic part about the game, which Syracuse won 21-17 on Terrel Hunt's 12-yard touchdown run with 1:14 remaining in the fourth quarter, was that a Syracuse SB Nation blog raised $44,444.44 to send 1,400 Houston kids to the game. If the ticket-buying entity had waited just before game time, the 1,400 kids could have gone for $14.
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