Last year, students complained that getting a student football ticket took too long. Now they’re complaining that it doesn’t take long enough.
In past years, getting a ticket meant camping out or standing in line for hours, but the new online ticketing system means tickets are selling out in as little as two minutes – leaving countless students ticketless, stunned and angry.
If it weren’t for a kind friend’s gift, University
senior Kevin Poehner wouldn’t have made it to the first game of the season against Washington, and he blames the online system.
“I was really bummed out (before my friend gave me his ticket),” Poehner said. “It’s my senior year. It was Washington. I really wanted to go but I got screwed.”

Poehner was so displeased he called ASUO
President Sam Dotters-Katz to complain.
“I said, ‘Dude, I didn’t get a ticket and I’m really pissed off right now.’ And he said, ‘I know, I’ve been getting calls like this all day.’”
Although the online ticketing system is ruffling the feathers of those who are having trouble getting one, athletic department officials and others are lauding the streamlined system.
“It was a long-time coming,” sophomore ASUO Senator Alex McCafferty said. “All the student
tickets are being claimed and almost everyone is going, so from that standpoint it shows the system is working just fine.”
Because tickets are now so easy to get,
demand has shot through the roof while supply has
stayed stagnant.
“That’s the biggest issue,” Garret Klassy, assistant athletic director for ticketing, said. “You don’t have to wait in line anymore, so more students want to go to the games.”
The increased demand made an especially large impact on preseason games. There were only 1,400 tickets offered at the Utah State game, for instance. The maximum number of student tickets allotted, 5,700, will be available against UCLA on Oct. 11.
Nevertheless, Poehner thinks the old method worked fine.
“It’s fun to camp out and stuff for tickets,” he said. “Waiting in line wasn’t particularly fun, but just having an actual ticket and not being freaked out about it. There’s no computer error about it.”
Still, support for a new ticketing method swelled in recent years as students regularly chose to stand in line on Mondays during the fall rather than go to class.
“The process was just so tedious,”
McCafferty said. “There has been overwhelming faculty support because people no longer
miss class.”
McCafferty participated in an ASUO
committee last year that decided on the new online
ticketing method. At the time, he heard almost no
opposition to it from students.
But now that some students are being left
watching the games from their couch, his inbox is getting slammed with complaints.
“I totally sympathize with these students,”
McCafferty said. “But there’s really no way to
verify (their complaint) … I’m sure there are students who just didn’t get a ticket and are just saying their
computer didn’t work.”
Klassy said the system should never crash, so the error students are likely receiving has to do with the tickets being sold out.
“This is a company that probably has 90 percent of the BCS (football schools) on it,” he said.
The technology can determine the order of clicks down to the microsecond. “It’s a technology that’s been used for years for big event sales.”
Klassy’s advice? Be sure to get online promptly at your designated time. The other option is to lobby
student government leaders to purchase more student tickets so more people can go.
“I don’t think there’s ever a perfect system,” Klassy said. “But we can always tweak it and make it the best we can.”
And what about the other complaint – that
standing in line is part of the fun?
“Yes, they’re going to miss waiting in line. Students and fans always have that sense of ownership of waiting in line. But I think it’s a thing of the past,” Klassy said. “The Internet has changed how everyone does ticketing these days. It’s a convenience thing.”
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