{"id":1242,"date":"2008-11-14T07:14:24","date_gmt":"2008-11-14T13:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/?p=1242"},"modified":"2022-01-02T07:36:03","modified_gmt":"2022-01-02T12:36:03","slug":"an-abnormal-november","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/?p=1242","title":{"rendered":"An Abnormal November"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"atl08.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Usually at this time of year, I have no problem tapping my usual sources for a couple of Tide football tickets. November hasn’t been very kind to Bama the past few years, so there’s always been someone anxious to unload them.<\/p>\n

This year, not so much. My sources have dried up like an Alabama creek bed in the heat of August. Go figure.<\/p>\n

Number One has tickets to the next two regular season games against Mississippi State and Auburn, but he’s had a tough time trying to get the hottest ticket of all, the SEC Championship Game against Florida in Atlanta on December 6.<\/p>\n

Unlike some schools such as Duke (where hard-core students have been known to camp out for days in freezing weather for a hot basketball ticket), Bama, claiming that they were worried about safety and “chaos” issues over first-come, first-served, chose to distribute their allotment of student tickets (12% of their total) to students with the most credit hours.<\/p>\n

This means that 631 students out of the 12,240 who applied had the chance this week to purchase two tickets at $45 a piece.<\/a> That’s 2.3% of the student body of 27,000.<\/p>\n

That meant that students who had four plus years at the school and were now enrolled in some graduate program received all the tickets, leaving the undergraduates for the most part in the cold.<\/p>\n

Now I’m sure this means that come game time, the Bama “student section” will be filled with those same “hard-core” graduate students, you know, the ones who are always<\/em> at every home game cheering their heads off, right?<\/p>\n

Heh. Maybe not. Last time Number One checked, most of them were selling those $45 tickets for $300-400 a piece!<\/p>\n

You can read about the breakdown of ticket sales here<\/a>, and no surprise, it’s the Tide Pride members, the big donors who pay Saban’s salary and fund stadium renovations, etc, who get first dibs. These days, that’s just good business in big-time college football.<\/p>\n

But I can think of several ways the administration could have distributed those tickets that would have ensured that a much broader cross-section of the student body was represented on such an auspicious occasion. Besides, there’s no reason why first-come, first served has to mean unsafe conditions and “chaos” in this computer age.<\/p>\n

When Bama sells their regular season student ticket packages in the spring, it’s those students with the wherewithal to get up early and start hitting the refresh button on their browser over and over who hit paydirt.<\/p>\n

Still, I’m sure that with so many students in T-town on December 6th (it is the weekend before finals start, after all) that there’ll be plenty of good pseudo-tailgate parties and HD TVs to take care of everybody. And really, an abnormal November is a good kind of problem to have.<\/p>\n

Roll Tide, Roll.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Usually at this time of year, I have no problem tapping my usual sources for a couple of Tide football tickets. November hasn’t been very kind to Bama the past few years, so there’s always been…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,43,48,72,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alabama-crimson-tide-football","category-college-football","category-family","category-nick-saban","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1242"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9254,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1242\/revisions\/9254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}