Every Sunday evening, it’s the same ol’ game.
Get online — for some of us, several hours early — hit F5 for what seems like 200,000 times, wait a while and then when your time arrives, click refresh one more time and click the game, hoping the extra second your laptop took to load doesn’t make you a half-second too late.
Only for a lot of us, it’s not even that easy. Get online a full hour before your time is up, but alas, those accursed diamonds have returned. And they won’t leave until five minutes after it won’t matter. Once an hour, you see your friends on Facebook either sharing in your gloom, “no tickets again this week :(,” or rejoicing in their success. Then a few hours later, the complaints are nowhere to be seen.
No more, says the ASUO.
At least, no more of this year’s level of missing tickets. In the face of a series of news releases with uncomfortable information regarding the University’s athletic department this week and the general concern that we’re paying too much for not enough tickets, the student government announced last week it was recommending no growth for the athletics budget.
Color us impressed; it was a bold move. But let us introduce a new wrinkle here: It was a bold move to counteract a series of unusually bold moves. Every time this topic comes up, we are reminded that during a different time — when (hold on to your hat) Oregon didn’t have an elite football program — the ASUO agreed to give up a section of seats. Section nine.@@http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-127140662/u-oregon-fate-u.html@@
And while we’ve been paying more every year since then, we continue to have a section around the same size.@@I’m not getting the sarcasm@@
It doesn’t make sense on a program level.
On a program level, home-field advantage matters. And if less students are able to go to games it will affect things. Yet, although a potential home game could decide our chances at a Rose Bowl game, the department is gifting that advantage away without consultation of its ASUO finance committee with the decision to charge students $45 for a ticket to the newly created Pac-12 Championship Game.
“That was completely not through the (Athletics and Contracts Finance Committee@@http://asuo.uoregon.edu/about.php@@) process,” ACFC member Bri Woodside-Gomez told the Emerald recently.
On this level, either these games are a part of the University experience and should be more open to students or they are not and they should be re-examined. These two things must be reconciled in some way or the way we advertise our University has to change. Because someone has to be ashamed of the fact that 77 percent of incoming students last year were being sold on an environment (6 home games for an elite football team) they would not experience.
The Pac-12 championship student tickets aren’t the problem, but a symptom of a greater problem. That is, the University’s athletic department is showing some level of disrespect for its student body, supposing it is coming from a position of power.
And when students in the ASUO chose last week to assess the athletic department no growth in the benchmark, they levied a certain amount of power back to themselves. And as Woodside-Gomez said in that original article, this is a bargaining chip. We don’t suppose that we will all of a sudden be receiving enough tickets or not.
But this is a step in the right direction. We’re going toward taking back power and respect from a body that owes us.