Florida State versus Alabama in Doak Campbell Stadium for the first time ever. Arch rival Miami. Osceola and Renegade. The Marching Chiefs. Tailgating with family and friends. Fireworks. There’s a number of traditional reasons to buy a ticket to football but there’s one more great reason too, the money you spend on your ticket is the money that funds your favorite men & women sport, as well as services for the 500-plus student-athletes who compete for the garnet and gold.
When thinking about buying tickets to a football game, most people don’t think about how their purchase impacts the comprehensive excellence they expect from the program, or how that football ticket purchase impacts the budget of the women’s sports team they love, or any of the other teams whose budget really does depend on your football decision to buy or not to buy.
Football is called the “Cash Cow” for a reason as the football ticket money realized – whether single game or season ticket – is the major funding source for all 19 sports at Florida State University.
Fortunately for FSU’s sports teams, football ticket sales have gone well enough to say, “The hay is in the barn” for the cash cow’s 2025 operating budget and for the annual bond payment on the football facilities. Therefore, it would be fair to say every ticket sold from this point forward is an extra dollar for Athletics Director Michael Alford to allocate to FSU’s other 18 sports and student services.
“Football is the revenue driver for all the other sports,” Alford told the Osceola in an interview in July. “A season ticket sale allows us to understand the income coming in to be able to supplement these other sports and really to plan ahead.”
Alford provides a softball example. “We’ll want to do something in softball, or a spring sport, but we’ll be holding off because that revenue is not guaranteed until we see how football is doing,” Alford said, “so the more season ticket holders we have, the more guaranteed income revenues we have to plan ahead.”
For well documented population and economic reasons, FSU hasn’t sold as many season tickets as have other ACC or SEC schools, so FSU’s athletic directors have had to rely more on single game sales which can be fickle.
While the public seating charts indicate there were less than 1500 unsold seats as of August 12 – and certainly less by the time you read this – the sale of those seats as single game tickets this season could generate more than $1 million in additional revenue for Alford to allocate to FSU team budgets and/or student services.
“We are in the mission of education, and we’re going to follow the educational mission of the university at all times, to provide those opportunities, tutors and everything else that comes along with our student athlete experience,” Alford said of the revenue derived from ticket sales.
Single game ticket purchases help too
The window for purchasing season tickets closes with the Alabama game but the ticket office window will remain open for single game tickets throughout Doak, some for as low as $32 each, and those sales impact the other sports too.
“(Selling out football) allows us to maintain that student-athlete experience that we’re so well known for here at Florida State,” Alford said, “providing a very first-class opportunity for young men and women to come here and grow.”
Alabama and Miami will buy their full 5000 seat allotment, and Kent State is parents’ weekend, so it is likely FSU will sell out of tickets to those three games. The other four visiting teams – East Texas A&M (Sept. 6), Pitt (Oct. 11), Wake (Nov. 1), Virginia Tech (Nov. 15) — will not use their full allotment, which means there will be more single game tickets available for FSU fans to enjoy the college football experience in Doak Campbell Stadium and provide a true homefield advantage. And in buying tickets to those games, FSU fans will help to fund all their favorite Seminoles teams and student services. 
Jerry Kutz
The Osceola
