If you ever wondered how excited Ohio State football fans are for the Cotton Bowl matchup vs. Missouri on Friday night, this should tell you all you need to know. According to multiple reports, the Buckeyes sold less than two-thirds of the tickets allotted to them.
Ouch.
In some ways it makes sense. There’s no doubt Buckeye fans had their hearts set on beating Michigan and ending a two-game losing streak, winning the Big Ten, then making it out to either the Rose Bowl or down to the Sugar Bowl in one of the semifinals of the College Football Playoff.
It didn’t happen, so most fans weren’t exactly chomping at the bit to gobble up tickets to go down to a wannabe warm weather location inside a dome in Dallas in a bowl game OSU just played in six years ago.
So, what are the numbers exactly? Ohio State was allotted about 12,000 tickets and sold approximately 7,500 of those before returning the rest to the Cotton Bowl. That’s a significant change in demand from last season when the Buckeyes made the College Football Playoff and played against Georgia in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. OSU sold its 13,000 tickets that were set aside in just a matter of days.
And if we want to look back on the last time OSU was in a non-CFP bowl game, there was still higher demand. At the end of the 2021 season, when the Buckeyes played Utah in the Rose Bowl, fans gobbled up 13,000 tickets, or about two-thirds of what the folks in Pasadena provided.
Ohio State sold less than two-thirds of its allotted tickets for the Cotton Bowl: https://t.co/4Rpxxnwfu2
— Joey Kaufman (@joeyrkaufman) December 28, 2023
There’s also a little bit of fatigue most likely with Buckeye Nation if not playing for the biggest of prizes. Ohio State is the only program to have made a New Year’s Six bowl game since the current format rolled out in 2014. Contrast that to Missouri, whose fans purchased about 13,000 Cotton Bowl tickets in just one day according to a spokesman. It’s the Tigers first New Year’s Six bowl game and fans want to be a part of it.
But hey, don’t worry — despite the low excitement to travel during the holidays for OSU fans, you can almost bank on them turning on television sets and streaming devices when the game kicks off at 8 p.m. ET on Friday night.
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