Ticket Trauma

NBC 4: With just six months before The Ohio State Buckeyes take the field on football Saturdays, the window just opened for students to purchase tickets. A change in the software system used to process ticket purchases created some confusion and left many hopeful buyers without seats to the must-see games.

Student tickets went on sale Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. and within the first 90 minutes, tickets to the highest-desired games were all gone. OSU Law School student Bryan Griffith said it took him more than two hours to get tickets as the system first told him to wait then failed to process his order three times. He called the new Ticketmaster ordering process a disaster. “The interest is growing with current students and so the eagerness to get tickets is there, so everybody hits the system very quickly,“ said Bill Jones, OSU Assistant Athletic Director for ticketing.

Jones said administrators will review how the first-year software can work better. But, he said, compared to last year when the school’s software proved incapable of handling demand and crashed, the new software worked. “I think we’re ecstatic. I never would have thought that we could have a system crash in the first hour last year, to go into a brand new system first-time around and receive 19,000 season tickets ordered in the first ten hours” he said.

But for hundreds of OSU medical students, the chance to purchase tickets never happened because of an email that didn’t arrive. “I wanted to go to the USC game and wanted that ticket really badly and I got online at 8 and spent several hours trying to get it and it was sold out when I went to get it,“ said Jessica Abraham, a second-year grad student.

The email contained a pass code that students needed to buy tickets. But med school students didn’t get the email. One theory is that the email was blocked by spam filters. But by the students figured out to call for their pass code on the phone, tickets for the best games were gone. “Everyone loves to go to the OSU football game and get tickets. They sell out so quickly and to not even get a chance, it was really frustrating,“ said Ruwan Kiringoda, a third-year student.

The medical students said their chances of scoring a ticket for the USC game are practically non-existent unless the university can give them a second chance. “There’s not going to be extra allocation for games that have sold out,“ Jones said.

Jones said the error was unfortunate and that the university is investigating to find out what happened and prevent it from occurring again. But, he said, not even med school students who missed out can be given special treatment on USC or Michigan tickets to make up for it.