Two guys who won't be going to University of Texas football games again this year? Jerry and Vernon Fuller, twin brothers from Jarrell who are avid Longhorn fans. Talk about enthusiastic. These guys would slap your back so hard after a UT touchdown that you'd cough up your H2Orange. Jerry and Vernon are known affectionately to their Longhorn fan friends as the Darryls, after the characters on 'Newhart.' You're wondering why screamin' Longhorn fans like Vernon and Jerry, who turned 55 on Tuesday, won't be headed to Royal-Memorial Stadium when the Horns play their first home game Sept. 11 against Wyoming. (They open on the road against Rice on Saturday.) Easy answer: money. Jerry and Vernon, I suspect, are like any number of Longhorn fanatics who have been priced out of the market by UT. Vernon teaches special ed to elementary school kids in Jarrell. Jerry drives a school bus. Neither guy will ever get mentioned in Forbes magazine. 'No, we don't go to games anymore,' Vernon said. 'It really got outpriced. We used to go and take our kids. We'd have three or four kids and me and Jerry. We'd always buy $5 tickets at Randalls and sit in the Horseshoe (the north end zone) and have the best seats in the house, And when Mack Brown came, those tickets went up to $65 just like the regular tickets, so we couldn't afford to take three kids and ourselves and buy them high-priced hot dogs and soda waters.' Even though they haven't been inside the stadium since 1998, when Ricky Williams broke the NCAA rushing record against Texas A&M, the Darryls still follow along closely. 'We still go down and tailgate (before the games) a lot of the times for the home games, and we hurry home and catch it on TV,' Vernon said. 'We would love to still be going, but we're just an average middle-income family that better pay the mortgage on the house, if you want to have a house to live (in). Sure can't live in the north end zone of DKR.' The ticket prices this year are running from $70 for the Wyoming and Florida Atlantic games up to $100 for Texas A&M. If you want to sit in a top-notch seat in Section 4 or 5, according to the Longhorn Foundation, you can give a donation of $3,800 to $5,000 per seat to sit there next year. On top of that, though, you still have to pay for the tickets. But you get what you pay for. Back when tickets were cheaper, the stadium wasn't as spectacular, there were no luxury boxes, and the Longhorns were pulling stunts like getting clobbered by UCLA 66-3. But not being able to get inside bugs the Darryls. 'Just because we didn't end up rocket scientists and make millions of dollars, we can't pay Mack Brown's salary,' Vernon said. 'We took the whole neighborhood with them $5 tickets from Randalls,' Jerry said. 'But the stadium looks nice.' You could spot the Darryls in the crowd. They're built like rodeo barrels, and they used to wear radio headsets over their ball caps with the antennas sticking up. This accessorizing earned them their other nickname, 'The Martians.' But don't expect to see the Martians landing their saucer on the 50-yard line. 'The almighty dollar, the making of the money, just forced us to where we couldn't afford to go anymore,' Vernon said. 'I guess Mack Brown's $5 million has to come from somewhere, but it's not coming from me.' John Kelso writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: jkelso@statesman.com. 