Meet our new blood bank president, Vlad Dracul, dept:

The student section recognized by ESPN’s College Gameday as the best in college football has turned heads again with a sellout of more than 21,000 season tickets today in a remarkable 59 minutes.

The unprecedented sale took place in record time, according to Bud Meredith, Director of Ticket Operations. The previous record was 13 days last year, using a combination of online sales and applications that were mailed to the ticket office.

This is news, but not for the obvious reason of Penn State student football tickets selling out in record time. It’s news because the in-house operations of ticket offices for college football teams are now being farmed out to Ticketmaster, a company with the popularity of herpes and a business model stolen directly from the third world kid who digs a hole in the road, gets an AK-47, and then asks you for “a donation” to show you the way around it.


We have assigned a pair of guards to protect the captured cocaine. It is perfectly safe in their hands.

Tickets always sell out rapidly with Ticketmaster, because they can handle zillions of calls and process transactions with rapid ease. They should be able to–the average markup on a Ticketmaster “property” can range anywhere from 35 to 50 percent of the face value of the ticket. This extortionate rate pays for the convenience of buying your tickets with Ticketmaster, a convenience we’ve usually associated with dialtones, huffy operators, and an inability to get the tickets we wanted to buy.

Why Penn State decided to Stefan Postma-tize their students with this, we’ll never know. It probably had to do with the tasty prospect of outsourcing ticket business completely and cutting the hassle of a “customer” that will clamor for the tickets no matter the price–the students. And for that privilege Penn State students paid $190 bucks this year, up fifty bucks from last season.

Iowa State has their students, too, signed up for a solid pegging, so grab some lube, Cyclones. You’re about to lose fifty dollars the hard way.