For Longhorns of a previous generation, having difficulty getting into Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium for Texas football home games seems foreign, as the former ticketing system, the Longhorns All-Sports Package (LASP), was vastly different from the current iteration.
“I never ran across anybody who wanted to go to a game and couldn’t get a ticket,” Stephen Meserve, a 2008 Texas graduate said. “If Texas is more popular now, when I was there they won a National Championship.”
In Fall 2014, the LASP was replaced by the more expensive and current “Big Ticket.”
According to an August 2014 interview with the Texan, Kevin Almasy, a former UT spokesperson, stated the LASP was in violation of standards set by the U.S. Department of Education.
“We couldn’t, by federal law, administer or tie the tickets to the registration process anymore,” Steve Hank, senior associate athletic director and chief revenue officer from 2014-2016, said in 2014. “Once that happened, we had to develop a new product and sell it in a new way. It was entirely due to federal regulation changes.”
The final year of the LASP, 2013-2014, the option cost students a one-time fee of $80 in the Fall or a pro-rated price of $40 in the Spring.
The base LASP gave students access to pull tickets in a “ticket draw” for Texas football games. Similar to the current Texas A&M ticket draw system, students had to line up in person at Bellmont Hall.
“You’d get your student IDs together the day before, and then you pick one person to go stand in line at (Bellmont Hall) to get seats,” Meserve said. “A lot of the tickets would be in the lower bowl. If you got there later or got a bad draw, you’d end up in the upper bowl.”
To skip the ticket draw lines, students could purchase an LASP season ticket for an additional $70, which guaranteed a reserved seat for every home football game.
Similar to the process used in this year’s SEC Championship game ticket claim, LASP season ticket holders had the option to create seating groups during purchase. This allowed students or organizations to sit with each other without hassle.
Despite a $10 price increase, the LASP operated this way for both the 2005 and 2010 national championship appearance seasons.
When the Big Ticket was introduced, the system was similar to the LASP in that it gave students a reserved seat to all football home games and general admission to other ticketed sports.
Additionally, both the first iteration of the Big Ticket and LASP had the option to purchase a season ticket for non-UT students. Another option, removed in 2018, was the non-football Big Ticket, which offered a pass to all other Texas Athletics sporting events.
Beginning in 2017, reserved seats became limited, and the south end zone — previously a part of the student section — was made general admission only. By 2018, the Big Ticket was exclusively general admission, eliminating reserved seating.
Reserved seating made a brief appearance this season during the UTSA game in September, placing students in the upper deck with a row and seat number, but did not return for the remainder of the season.
In its current iteration, purchase of the Big Ticket does not guarantee a ticket or even a seat in the student section, leading to Student Government members approving expansion of the student section early this October. Despite this, the section has remained the same for the entirety of the season.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misspelled a source’s name. This has been corrected. The Texan regrets this error.
