WVU is closed today, a rare and significant act that rather vividly illustrates the concern about transportation to and from campus. On campus tonight is this WVU v. Villanova game. No tickets can be purchased by conventional means, but you can be reasonably sure several hundred to a few thousand people won’t attend.

That’s … unfortunate … given the recent attention devoted to the WVU fans and how this is maybe a chance to get it right and show off a little bit on national television. Empty seats and probably a thinned out student section — and I could have that one absolutely incorrect; I’ll get to that later — might not look so flattering on ESPN. So there’s a problem there and one we can see from a distance.

I thought about this (honest!) a little while before I received this email:

I’ve ripped the ticket office before on the blog so I wanted to channel this rant and see if I’m being unreasonable or whether I’m on to something.  So there’s apparently a foot or so of snow in Morgantown and it’s probably fair to say that given the conditions we’re looking at about 8,000 fans for tomorrow night between a presumably 4th ranked Mountaineers and top ten Villanova team.  Why can’t the ticket office do one of a combination of things to ensure the place is packed tomorrow night?  

For instance. Sell $5 general admission tickets for a few upper deck sections and move ticket holders of those sections that show up one to one of the thousand empty seats elsewhere.  Increase the student allotment and don’t guarantee them a seat and remind them to yield any seat they claim to its ticket holder when they show up (if not for the Pitt debacle, this may have been more seriously considered)  Have season ticket holders who can’t make it, call the office, and allow them to donate their seats to a local non profit as a tax deduction.  Do something though.

Any excuse for not having a quick response or contingency plan, with as much notice as they’ve had considering the weather, is just an indictment of how unorganized they are.  (And this I’ve said before, but how much can they know about their ticketholders, if the tickets don’t have bar codes?)  We need to get with the times, embrace technology, and some creativity. Instead, we’ll be half full and the scalpers will make any money that’s out there.