Today, the Badger student population received an email from the Wisconsin Athletic Ticket Office informing us that they are changing the system for distributing student season football tickets in several major ways. If you're a Badger football fan, you probably already know the changes well enough to have reacted to them with more than a few expletives; otherwise you probably don't care and should stop reading this post unless you're really bored or something. It's pretty long.
Here's a summary of the main changes to the student ticket distribution process as explained on the Badger Athletics website:
(1). All student tickets will now be distributed by lottery.
(2). Student tickets will no longer be mailed, and must now be picked up from the Athletic Ticket Office between August 18th and September 19th.
(3). Students will no longer be assigned a specific seat, and will now be issued a wristband simply granting them access to a "specific section area" (i.e. M, N, O, P).
(4). Section P is no longer exclusive to upper-classmen.
While I can't say I completely approve of them, changes (2)-(4) to the distribution policy are all understandable, at least in part.
Lets start with change (2) (students must pickup tickets, rather than having their vouchers mailed to them). While I never personally had issues receiving my football tickets in the mail, it's more than reasonable to postulate that mass-mailing 10,000+ sets of tickets creates a number of problems. Students purchasing tickets can give a wrong address, resulting in the tickets being sent somewhere besides their intended destination. The Ticket Office also inevitably loses the tickets of a few students in the mailing process, due simply to the sheer volume of tickets they have to handle. Finally, mailing tickets to students incurs postage and labor costs which are eliminated by making students pick up their own tickets.
On a basic level, I agree with the Ticket Office's decision to make we, the students pick up our own football tickets. This policy solves a number of problems and puts the responsibility for having tickets by the start of the season (August 30 vs. Akron) in the hands of the students who will be using the tickets. If you really care about seeing all the games, you'll make sure to get your tickets before kickoff of the first game. If you're one of those people who spends the entire first quarter drinking and usually shows up sometime halfway through the second quarter, you'll likely miss at least the first game.
Still, the Ticket Office's pickup schedule is flawed. August 18 is too late a date to open the voucher pickup process. A better date to start the process would be August 13, the day before most leases in Madison expire. Many students come to Madison for the move on August 14th/15th and then return home to continue working or whatever else might need to be done at home until shortly before the school year starts. Starting the voucher pickup process on the 13th would make it easy for such students to swing by the Athletic Ticket Office on the day before or after their move to their new apartment, house, etc. to pick up their football tickets.
While I'm not saying that moving the date back to August 13 from August 18 will necessarily have a significant impact on this, the Ticket Office better have a good plan in place for distributing a large amount of tickets on August 30, the day of the first home game. College students have a generally high moment of inertia when it comes to fulfilling obligations (i.e. doing papers the night before their due). The result of this high moment of inertia will be swaths of students who haven't picked up their tickets prior to the first game. This opening gameday rush will only be compounded by the fact that the top priority for many students upon returning to Madison is seeing friends who they may not have seen all summer, not picking up football tickets. Basically, the Ticket Office better be on point and ready to deal with liquored up students trying to pick their tickets up on August 30.
Change (3) (wristbands guaranteeing access to a section rather than a specific seat) makes the most sense of all the changes and I take no issue with it. Being merely granted access to a general section was already the de facto system, at least in the three seasons I've been attending Badger football games in the student section. Students arriving early to games will still be able to claim the near-field seats they covet.
The wristband system also alleviates a problem which affected a group of my friends last year. They arrived at a game only to find the seats on their tickets occupied, so, not being assholes, they moved to the best available seats within their section. Sometime during the second quarter another group of students arrived demanding to sit in the exact seat numbers listed on their tickets, which my friends now occupied. After my friends refused and told the contesting group to "deal," the contesting group returned to their seats with a police officer, who promptly made my friends move. However, when my friends asked the officer to take them to the seats promised on their tickets, he refused, not wanting to start a never ending chain of moving students around to their actual seats. As result, my friends were forced even higher in the section. The old system simply wasn't just for that reason, and the new wristband system fixes that problem.
Change (4) (Section P no longer exclusively upper-classman) is largely inconsequential, unless you're an upper-classman who really cares about being surrounded exclusively by other upper-classmen. I've had upper-classman tickets for the past two seasons and have yet to sit in Section P, so it could just be me, but I don't feel like change (4) is ultimately very important.
If you've made it through the prior 939 words then you've made it long enough to hear my ultimate complaint, which lies both with and, in a sense, beyond Change (1) (all student tickets awarded by lottery). Before I get to my major complaint, I must first remark that the size of the student section increased to 14,000 for the 2008-2009 season, from 10,500 in prior seasons, which is a step in the direction I desire.
However, even with the increased number of available student tickets, the lottery system is fundamentally flawed. Under the new lottery system, 2,000 football tickets are guaranteed to each year, freshman through senior, with 500 tickets allocated to graduate students, and the remaining 5,500 granted by a lottery where seniors have four chances to win, juniors three, sophomores two, and freshman a single chance to win.
The number of tickets each class receives is besides the ultimate point I'm trying to make, however. Every Wisconsin college student who wants to attend Wisconsin college football games should be able to do so. The lottery will probably allocate student tickets more fairly than the previous system, but even this revised system is inherently unfair because there are students who want football tickets who are unable to receive them.
I know that student tickets are priced at a face value which is well below their actual value in the resale market. Therefore, there is an incentive for the Athletic Department to sell as few student tickets as will prevent controversy. Selling more of the significantly higher priced non-student season tickets results in greater profits for the Athletic Department, and profits seem to be their ultimate goal. I'm arguing that the experience of Badger students (a non-market value), for and from whom the Badger football team exists, should be more important than the Athletic Departments' desire to capture higher profits.
As much as I hate to hold the [goddamn] Univeristy of Michigan up as any kind of standard, the Wolverines distribute their student football tickets in a better manner than the University of Wisconsin-Madison currently does, or for that matter, ever did. Every Michigan student who wants season football tickets can have them, so long as he or she applies during a specified registration period. What I propose is for the UW Athletic Department to change the student football ticket lottery registration period of June 15-30, to an outright student football ticket registration period in the light of Michigan's. Under my alternative systen, if you are a UW student attending UW during the fall semester and you register (and pay) for tickets between June 15 and June 30, you will have tickets when football season comes around. I know Camp Randall doesn't have the benefit of holding 110,000+ fans like Michigan's "Big House" does, but I feel our 80,500 seats could adequately accommodate all UW students who want to attend games, and enough "general" Badger fans to make everyone happy.
NOTE 1: I recognize that completely overhauling the student football ticket distribution system will create major disturbances in the short run ticket market, especially with regards to the existing "general" season ticket holders and the student ticket resale market. I don't really want to get into that right now because that would another 1,500 words worth of analysis. Just know that in the long run, allowing all students desiring season football tickets to have them would improve the Badger football experience more than it detracted from it, in my opinion. Perhaps I'll post what I would expect to happen should the Athletic Ticket Department change to my proposed system tomorrow, when I have more time, motivation.
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