It’s a time-honored tradition: one day every summer, University of Wisconsin students roll themselves out of bed at 7 a.m., fire up their computers (several per person, usually) and stare at a screen (or screens) reading “please wait.” For the luckiest of Badgers, the waiting ends with happiness in its purest form — season football tickets. For the less fortunate among us, the waiting never really ends. Instead, it gradually tapers into the realization that the tickets weren’t meant to be this year. The majority of students buy their tickets with the best intentions. They buy them and then use them, maybe selling a ticket or two for games they can’t make it to. Unfortunately, a small but very real minority of students choose to abuse the system — they buy their tickets then immediately turn around and sell them for a profit. While these people are generally bad human beings and are in fact the scum of the earth, the real problem lies with the system UW uses to sell tickets. With a few changes, this whole situation could be vastly improved.

At the heart of the issue is the fact that UW sells student season tickets at a steep discount: $168 plus a $20 “processing” (bullshit) fee. Because UW subsidizes these tickets so much, demand for them far outpaces supply. Even if tickets were sold at $500 each, or maybe more, there’s little doubt that they would still sell out. UW could up the price gradually until the demand exactly meets the supply. Not only would this eliminate the problem of resale, it would also maximize the money being made from the ticket sales.

However, this is an extremely less-than-ideal solution. Season tickets are being subsidized for good reason — as a campus, we seem to have decided that Badger games should be something everyone can enjoy, not just the richest segment of the student body. Selling tickets at market value would turn Badger games into nothing more than LeBron James-era Miami Heat games — a bunch of rich people sitting around on their phones in the stands.

So if we can’t scrap the subsidies, what’s the best option?

It’s simple. Rather than issuing paper tickets, UW should tie the tickets electronically to the buyer’s student ID. This way, there’s nothing for people to resell. To get into the games, you just show up with your Wiscard. If someone buys tickets, they’re buying them to use them, not to screw someone else over.

This solution would be easy to implement. Students already have to login with their NetID to buy tickets. All that would have to be added is a system to actually associate the tickets with a given ID, and a way of checking for tickets on a student’s Wiscard. While this is a nontrivial task to be sure, it’s perfectly plausible.

Dealing with tickets electronically has the added value of eliminating a significant amount of paper waste, as well.

Of course, it’s not entirely reasonable to expect every student to attend every game. To deal with, UW could implement an online ticket marketplace where ticketholders can sell single game tickets — with a limit of only selling one or two tickets for a given season. When someone buys a ticket, it gets transferred directly to their Wiscard — no paper necessary. This gives students the flexibility to get rid of a couple of tickets without letting them dump their season tickets at a profit.

This isn’t a perfect system, and there are certainly some difficulties that need to be ironed out (e.g., purchasing a ticket for non-student friend coming to visit.) However, these problems are minor, and could be fixed without much trouble. Even with these flaws, this ticket selling scheme is far superior to what we have now. Under our current system, a person acting rationally would try to buy tickets regardless of whether or not they actually want to go to the games. It’s simply foolish to maintain a flawed system when there is a much simpler solution waiting to be used.

Joe Timmerman ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in math and economics with a computer science minor. In case it wasn’t obvious, he did not get season tickets this year.