Football Ticket Distributions, UNC Fans in Need of Change

For all sports fans, this is usually the greatest time of the year to be the fanatic. Football in the college and professional ranks is heating up, hockey season has kicked off, baseball is rapidly approaching the World Series, and college basketball is but a few weeks away.

Given the performance at Midnight with Matt and the John Bunting-era for the football team, UNC athletic programs are again on the rise.

The University, however, isn't providing the necessary environment to give its students the ability to support these teams to the fullest.

The most obvious and recent example of this failure was the Carolina Athletic Association's hatchet job on the football ticket distributions. Instead of sticking to standard basketball distribution practices, they decided to mix things up.

Although I appreciated camping out for tickets for a change, the tickets for both the Texas and N.C. State games shouldn't have been distributed on a weekday. The academics and athletics of the University should never be mutually exclusive.

You know there's a problem when a full third of a Tuesday lecture class is missing merely because they want to see a football game Saturday. Many fans were left out of these games because they simply could not miss class to get football tickets.

Second, the block system the CAA instituted along with the weekday distribution further undermined its distribution system. Why bother standing in line for hours when your ticket to the game essentially is guaranteed by merely placing your name on an enormous block list? Students thankfully wised up to this charade and turned in an enormous number of block lists for the State game, though only a third of those requests were filled.

CAA should have either gone full-bore with the campout idea over a weekend earlier in the season or simply run it like a normal basketball distribution. Trying to get creative with the distribution process only hurt the fans.

I think part of the problem is the fans themselves. Over the past four years, the only thing I have ever been ashamed of with this University is the nature of our fans. Like it or not, basketball and football are dominated by the wine-and-cheese crowd. We show up 10 minutes late and leave 10 minutes early. Our fans act as if it is our divine right to be terrible fans yet expect our teams to feel motivated by the lack of crowd support.

The Dean Dome is more like walking into a cathedral or a morgue rather than a raucous basketball environment. The only basketball game of the last four years that I would define as raucous was the infamous "snow game" against Maryland. With the old folks shut in from the storm, the students took over and, heaven forbid, made some noise.

This notion was only confirmed at Midnight with Matt, where members of the geriatric jet-set not only sat for most of the festivities but actually asked me to sit down on several occasions. What's even worse are those geezers in training, showing up to the game dressed like they're going to NV, acting like they're too cool to be there while chatting away on their newest cell phone.

So, I have a challenge for those wine-and-cheesers out there. If you truly bleed Carolina blue, act like you care about the team. Go absolutely nuts every home game. Show up hours in advance, and tailgate like there's no tomorrow.

As Stuart Scott said at Midnight with Matt, these years will stay with us forever, with UNC on our hearts and minds. While we're here, we should at least show this love of our school by supporting our teams in a proper fashion. This includes the University organizations whose job it is to make sure we have every means available to yell and scream at the top of our lungs in Kenan Stadium and the Dean Dome.

Contact Joseph Rauch at rauch@email.unc.edu.