Lowest of the Low

There is nothing like the adrenaline rush when the lights go down, newspaper is crumbled and thrown in the air, and Kernkraft 400 plays as the Terps highlight reel is shown onscreen overhead.

Yet, the only non-Duke game with that much pre-game electricity and excitement was last year’s upset of then fifth-ranked UNC. It’s just not the same when Comcast isn’t packed. It's just not the same when a large number of UMD students only care about the Duke game. That is why the only person lower on my list of most-hated University of Maryland students than the annoying kid who tries to correct the professor (see Steve and Andrew’s earlier posts) is the

Scan-and-Leaver.
For those unfamiliar with UMD’s online sport ticketing process, students can request a ticket online about two weeks before the game. If the total number of requests is greater than the number of student seats available (about 4,000 in Comcast Center and 10,000 at Byrd Stadium) then a lottery determines which students get seats to the game based on loyalty points accumulated during the season. One loyalty point is awarded if the game sells out (if more students request tickets than there are seats available), and two loyalty points are awarded if the game doesn’t sell out. The more loyalty points that students have, the greater chance they have of getting seats.

Football games at Byrd, even against ACC opponents, rarely require the lottery. This year’s primetime Thursday night matchup with highly ranked WVU on ESPN was the only game in the past two years in which more than 10,000 students requested tickets. Men’s Basketball games are a completely different story. Although students get the best seats in the house in the lower bowl, there are only a total of 4,000 available, including baseline seats on the Wall. Since the Terps play in the best basketball lig in the country, almost all conference games require the lottery system.

How does one acquire tickets to the important ACC games? By attending the non-conference games, the traditional blowouts against cupcake mid-majors (although this season Gary’s boys gave us an OT game and a loss to American). But for some students, these games are boring and uninteresting, and for some of these students, ACC conference play doesn’t matter at all. They only care about a single game with the New York Yankees of the ACC, the Duke Blue Devils. These students participate in a ritual deeply hated by true and loyal student fans: scanning and leaving. They merely walk into the student entrance of Comcast, have their ticket scanned to get loyalty points, walk to the nearest exit, and leave before even checking to see what’s going on down on the court below.

When ACC games come before the Duke game and students still proceed to scan and leave, two major problems arise: 1) some students who want to actually go see the game (what a concept, right?) are denied tickets by the idiots who only want loyalty points, and 2) the Comcast Center feels empty when not even half of the Wall is filled with students. So either the Duke game comes earlier, and those fraudulent fans never even watch the later games, or it comes late, and fans who want to see the other games are denied the opportunity. Either way, it’s a huge problem that the UMD Athletic Department needs to correct.

They have tried running a series of ads on the jumbo-tron before the start of games to discourage scanning and leaving which feature students discussing their favorite games that they would have missed had they scanned and left. Most of these are games that fans wouldn't scan and leave for anyways, such as last season's upset of UNC or one of the many upsets of Duke. The students sitting in Comcast two minutes before tip-off aren't the ones that need to hear this message though. This feeble attempt to persuade students not to scan and leave simply doesn't do enough.

One of the easiest ways to fix this problem is to simply add an additional barcode to the printed student ticket. In order to recieve the full loyalty point(s), students would have to have this secondary barcode scanned on the way out. Exit-scanners would start scanning tickets with ten minutes left in the game to ensure that students would have to stay and watch the majority of the game. Sure, in the event of a fire or emergency where the arena would have to be emptied quickly, tickets would not be scanned for safety reasons.

This proposed system may not be the answer, but steps must be taken to prevent scanning and leaving in the future. It is up to the Athletic Department to ensure that they won't get away with this. It's pissing off the loyal fans and destroying the spirit of Maryland Basketball.