The Tickets Are Free, But Attendance Costs Money - Oh Yeah!

(2/20/02)

What kind of people does the campus want to give men's basketball tickets to? The obvious answer is "people who don't trample other people's possessions after a three-day campout," but there's a larger issue here.

After all, the campus has been justly proud of its ever-increasing academic standards, its vibrant arts culture, and its continuing role, as a public university, to ensure a quality, (medium-)low-cost education for everyone who deserves one in the state of Maryland. In its ad during the CBS telecast of Sunday's game, in which we kicked Duke's sucker punk asses (as you know), the campus was even impressed enough with itself to tout all those virtues. That's why it seems rather odd that distribution system in place for big games favors people whose time is completely worthless and people with more disposable income than they can figure out how to use.

Of course, distributing tickets to the idle and the rich is not the stated goal of the current policy. Keeping student tickets free for all is supposed to eliminate any economic barriers to telling Mike Dunleavy how much he sucks; having students camp out to get tickets is supposed to reward devotion to our mighty gladiators of the hardwood. The current system shuns the market to attempt to reward virtues that markets generally don't capture, like school spirit and loyalty. But right now, we've got our incentives all screwed up, and the Athletic Department needs to think seriously about how to adjust them if it wants to reward the right people.

Think about it: Who can actually spend the time and effort required to snuggle up against the side of Cole in the dead of winter for days before tickets are distributed for a big game? Not people with jobs, certainly. And while studying has been known to occur in line, it's hard to imagine a whole lot of (say) reports getting written unless you have a laptop or an anachronistic professor. Only for people who feel few financial, academic, or social pressures, for the most part, is the reward greater than the cost in lost opportunities.

And if your time is that worthless, you might well want to try to get some money for your most abundant commodity. While the Athletic Department seems a bit disturbed by the prospect of people reselling their tickets, it's pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two seconds that if you set up a system in which tickets are purchased with time, people with a lot of money and little time will pay some money to people who have all the time in the world and almost none of the money to get a ticket. Despite the attempts to remove the market from the process, it reasserts itself, trying to get resources distributed more evenly. Well-intentioned protests aside, this is an inevitable outcome of the current system.

Is it what we want, though? I will freely admit to a personal bias here. I commute to campus, I freelance for two publications in addition to this one, I take odd writing jobs on the side, and I like to keep my grades nice and high. No matter how much I like shouting "SILVER SPRING!" whenever Lonny Baxter represents my hometown by pulling down a big rebound, the pressures of my life mean that when I've wanted to yell when Lonny pulls down rebounds over [Duke Blue Devil] Carlos Boozer, I've been yelling at a TV.

But the system may well be changing for those who will follow me in hating Duke (which is all of you who aren't graduating seniors, I would have to assume). The Diamonback reported that a system is being considered to distribute tickets to the Virginia game, the last to be played at Cole, that would distribute some tickets on the basis of loyalty (having picked up tickets to a certain number of earlier games) and the rest in a lottery. This system has a perfectly supportable loyalty bias, but no one else would be favored except by Lady Luck. (And, of course, some who win will sell their tickets, since the lottery has no entry fee.) However, plans for future years of big-game distributions are still up in the air.

I would submit that if the campus is really as committed to academics and an active campus life as it is to athletics, then the Athletic Department should consider structuring future ticket distribution systems to reward people who excel in those areas. The current program of reserved tickets for student groups could be expanded. A certain percentage of tickets could be set aside for commuters whose devotion may be total but whose ability to skip work and camp out may be less so. If we really wanted to get serious about academics, we could even institute a GPA filter on ticket distribution; everyone above (say) a cumulative 3.0 would have first crack, followed by the less diligent students.

All of the above plans would piss a bunch of people off, of course, which leads me to the most important point: There is no way to make everyone happy when you're distributing a scarce resource. This is a basic truth of economics. You have to make a choice. Unless you do everything by a straight lottery, the distribution method is going to favor some group of people. And some members of that group, having been favored by the system, are going to convert their tickets into cash. That's how markets work, and last I looked Kim Il Sung wasn't our president. Given that, whoever ends up designing the new system needs to (more) carefully consider who, exactly, the campus wants to give men's basketball tickets. It's almost always more complicated than it looks.

Currently the campus is proceeding with a lottery with a loyalty bias, and the Diamondback is complaining about all the stuff I said would happen under this system. The administration is trying not to make a choice and overlooking the fact that it's making a choice in doing so—that it can't not make a choice, to abuse the grammar. The students at Maryland would be better served if the university realized that these tickets can serve as a reward for something and then figured out what they should reward. Meanwhile, I'm never going to get a Duke ticket in a million years, not that this surprises me.

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