For an entire week, a campus full of frustrated students who were unable to get season passes have been waiting for news on how to secure a ticket to the home opener against East Carolina on Saturday. This Thursday afternoon, we finally received those instructions in an email and are now scrambling, with a day left before the game, to try to get a seat. 
If that wasn't bad enough already, there was a major problem with this email. The message stated that tickets would be canceled if they hadn't been claimed by Thursday at 5 p.m. The email was sent Thursday at 5 p.m.
There are, more than likely, students who wished to cancel their tickets but had already claimed them before receiving these instructions, in fear of being penalized by the system if they didn't. Now, in order to cancel these claimed tickets, students are required to send individual emails to Ticketing asking to have their tickets dropped. Unless the Ticketing staff turn into robots, there's a slim chance they will be able to manually process all of these requests in the span of one day, especially with a campus of 30,000 students and a department that has routinely proved it can rarely get anything right the first time around.
There's no reason that trying to attend a football game should be this difficult. This is no longer, as the email from Ticketing on Thursday afternoon so nicely stated, a "slight technical problem." This is a fiasco, one caused by poor communication and a severe lack of organization that has now left consequences for us to suffer. Student ticketing needs to get it together, and it needs to do so now — or, at the very least, before the next home game.