(Written by kencraw)

This being an odd-year, the Big Game is at Stanford. As we all know, the new Stanford Stadium doesn’t have room for all Cal Season Ticket holders, so you’ve got to be on the ball to get tickets to the game. Today at 8:30 AM the tickets went on sale for non-donor season ticket holders (aka, cheap people like me).

I got my order through at 8:31 AM. 🙂

If you’re a season ticket-holder, RUN, don’t walk, over to calbears.com and get your tickets NOW. They may be gone by lunchtime.

If you’re still here reading this, you either got your tickets already or you’re not planning on going to the game (or you’re back after running)…

So it’s time for my 2nd annual Big Game ticket allocation rant:

The athletic office limits Big Game ticket sales based on accounts. Big donors, no matter how many season tickets they have, can order 6 Big Game tickets. Non-Donor season ticket-holders and regular donor non-season ticket holders, no matter how many season tickets they have, can order 4 Big Game tickets. And low-level donors without season ticket holders can order 2.

I get that Donors get special privileges and I don’t have one iota of a problem about them getting priority and being able to buy tickets that others can’t. I understand that even if they’re not season-ticket holders. That’s not my complaint. Donors deserve special privileges.

My complaint is that if holding season tickets is a criteria for whether you can get Big Game tickets, which I’m glad it is, how many tickets you hold should be part of a criteria of how many tickets you can purchase.

I have 6 season tickets in one account. I can only buy 4 tickets. So somebody in my family is going to get the shaft this November (3 kids right now, so I only need 5 tickets, the 6th is for family growth and we don’t mind the extra room in the stadium). I’m OK with that if everyone else had the same problem. But guess what? There’s a group who sits right next to us in the stadium that has 3 tickets, but since they’re all just buddies, they’ve got the tickets in 3 different accounts so they’re billed separately. So, those 3 guys with 3 tickets can buy TWELVE Big Game tickets between them.

That just doesn’t make any sense. Is what the ticket office wants is for me to split my 6 ticket account into 3 accounts so I can get more tickets for the Big Game? Seems like a logistical nightmare waiting to happen with a bunch of special requests to make sure those tickets are seated together for the regular season-tickets (a request the ticket-office fulfills for those 3 buddies).

Here’s my recommendation on how the ticket office should run things:

They should allocate tickets separately based on donations and based on the number of season tickets one has. Something like this:

Big Donors get 6 tickets
Regular Donors get 4 tickets
Small Donors get 2 tickets
Season ticket-holders get 1 ticket for every 2 they have.

So, if I’m a season ticket holder with 6 tickets, I’ll get three from that and if I want 6 tickets, I need to be a “regular donor” to be allocated an additional 4. (I’m purposely avoiding the dollar figures since it’s not that important, logically speaking.) If I only need 5, I could be a “small donor”.

I set it up this way because I wanted to allow for allocating a smaller number than one has season tickets for, because that although tough to swallow it would be fair, but I think in principle it should be 1 ticket for every 1 season ticket you have.

And remember, none of this affects the order in which one has priority. I’m still OK that Big Donors get first priority and then there’s a priority scale from there, so that if the Big Game tickets sell out before the non-donor season-ticket holders get a chance to purchase, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

But it’s just not fair that I get the shaft with my 6 tickets when someone with 3 can get 12 when neither of us has made any donations to the University. Doing things “per account” is just stupid.