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Transmittal Memo
To: Penn State Athletics Department
From: Cole Bogner, Harrison Pierno, & Megan Holtzman
Date: 1 December 2021
Subject: Alterations to the Current Penn State Football Student Ticketing Process

To whom it may concern,

We are a team of students looking to create some change within the Penn State football
student ticketing process.
This proposal seeks to gain your support and approval of the alteration of the Penn State
Football ticketing process. Through the implementation of an altered ticketing process with
multiple times throughout different days, we aim to combat computer crashes, technical
difficulties with Ticketmaster, conflicting schedules, and differing time zones. Although
Ticketmaster and Penn State have a great relationship that allows Penn State students to
purchase tickets and download them straight to their Penn State Athletics app, the actual
process of obtaining these tickets is not only stressful, but very ineffective leaving many
students feeling robbed of a football experience. This negative experience is amplified by
technical problems, scheduling conflicts, financial constraints and other barriers. Our goal is to
enhance this process so that students have a higher probability of getting tickets with less
likelihood to have a stressful experience. This report will provide you with further background
information, a detailed research plan, and a feasible solution that is sure to make you reconsider
the current process.
Thank you for allowing us to share our ideas on this report with you. We really
appreciate it and look forward to hearing back from you soon! If you have any questions please
feel free to reach out to us!

Sincerely,

Cole Bogner, Harrison Pierno, & Megan Holtzman

240.444.3209 | mth5398@psu.edu

Penn State University: English 202D

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Executive Summary

This report analyzes the ongoing issue of Penn State’s football ticketing process that has

continued to be deemed a stressful and ineffective method through various surveys and studies

conducted towards students. Throughout the partnership between Ticketmaster and Penn

State, a want for a new ticketing process is not out of the ordinary as this method has been

known to be unsuccessful in many cases.

To acquire a ticket, students are arranged by class (graduates, seniors, juniors, sophomores,

freshman) and are designated a specific day they are to attempt to register for a chance to get a

ticket. On the day of registration, each student is to join a queue at 7 AM where they will wait

and hope it all goes well as this is one of their only chances of getting the chance to have a

Penn State football experience. Due to the mass amount of people logging in at the same time,

students tend to experience issues with the website crashing and losing their spot to get a

ticket.

Our recommendation is to divide the day of registration into four different time slots to help

mitigate the issue. Having four separate times throughout the day will allow students in different

time zones to have more of a realistic chance to get their ticket under better circumstances.
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Introduction

The process of getting Penn State football tickets can be very difficult to acquire and a stressful

experience for students that intend on purchasing season tickets for students. For students, this

can be a decision making whether or not they decide to attend football games. With a fixed price

of $239 for a season ticket, students are given 7 tickets to those home games. However, the

flaws of this process need to be changed and will be addressed in this memo. Due to many

complaints from students and first hand experiences of trying to obtain tickets, this proposal has

aimed to define the major issue within the flawed ticketing process for students, research

among students who have tried to acquire tickets through surveys, and collaborated to

brainstorm and formally agree on a feasible alternative for this process.

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Why Does this Process Need to Change?

The General Idea

Since the change in the student ticketing process earlier this decade, the partnership between

Ticketmaster and Penn State has been a major issue for students getting tickets for their own

leisure in upcoming academic years. Problems ranging from: a universal time for purchasing

tickets which result in timeouts on the website when attempting to purchase them to frustration

with the way Penn State has handled this process. A plethora of students have been begging

Penn State to change the way tickets are distributed among students, however, no formal

change has resulted from these various complaints.

Currently, the flawed process begins with students waking up at the universal time of 7 AM

Monday through Friday. The first day of the process covers tickets for all graduate students,

followed by Seniors, Juniors, Sophomore, and Freshman on Friday. The total number of student

tickets in Beaver Stadium is 21,000 or 4,200 per class which equates to roughly 17% of Beaver

Stadiums total capacity.

Penn State’s Beaver Stadium totals for a comparison between student section and the
total capacity, the student section is 17% of the total capacity
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The Problem’s Snowball effect

The problem is when these 4,200 tickets are sold each day at 7 AM, more students join the

queue in hopes of attending Penn State football games for the Fall Semester. The bandwidth of

the process cannot withstand the amount of students that log in, making a flaw in Penn State's

process of the best method to distribute these tickets. However, the issue gets larger there with

the time being 7 AM, students must wake up at least 15 minutes early to enter a queue to

attempt to get these tickets.

Another major issue is the time that you can purchase these tickets. Being an international

University, should account for the fact that there are students in time zones that do not comply

well with that one universal time. For example, this could be an issue for west coast students,

being that there is approximately a three hour time difference, students there must wake up

more than 3-hours earlier than east coast students. This gives an advantage to east coast

students who have the luxury of waking up later and being a little more equipped. Additionally,

those 4,200 tickets cause an issue, as all of the tickets are allocated at one given time which

results in crashes that put even more students at a disadvantage to acquire student tickets.
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Field Research Findings and their Correlation to the issue at hand

Of our initial study we found that of the 126 students we surveyed, 15% of
students did not try to get football tickets this year

These issues have gone on for years, upon doing research that collects data among students

who have tried to buy Penn State Football tickets, we have observed among a population of 126

people 85% of them attempted to buy student tickets.

Of that total population of 126 students, 49 did not get tickets this
year
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A large 39% of the 107 did not actually receive tickets either when attempting to get up on their

given day. This part of the data was not subjective of the rest as it did not account for the

amount of issues that students experienced during this process. So we needed to take further

action.

Our next survey question aimed to see how many of those students that tried to
get tickets experienced problems, of which 67 people did

Lastly, we dug deeper to find that of those 107 students that attempted to get tickets, 63% of

them experienced some kind of issue while trying to purchase these tickets. These numbers are

quite large in relation to each class, but they cannot be generalized for the entire 21,000

students who did receive tickets.

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Through researching and administering surveys, we have concluded that there is a major

problem based on the data we have collected. We have all agreed that a change needs to be

made in order to fix this flawed process of getting student tickets at Penn State. Penn State

must change the way student tickets at Beaver Stadium are dealt to students to ensure there is

an even playing field for students from all over.

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How Are We Going to Fix This?

Our Analysis

Through this research we have considered many different solutions to this issue at hand. We

have navigated to one solution that will account for the crashes as a result of the large number

of students who attempt to get tickets during this experience, the time differences of students

from various locations around the world, and better overall chance at getting tickets for students

who pursue them.

A Feasible, Fair plan for all

The proposal is simple, as the dates for purchasing tickets would stay the same along with the

way the classes go, so still in order to have graduates, seniors, juniors, sophomores and

freshman from Monday to Friday. The only difference would be adding multiple times to

account for people that didn’t get the opportunity to get them at the first given time, people that

live in different time zones, or people that had an issue with processing to get their tickets.

The Process

The process of this solution is very simple and goes as follows; a student will have 4

opportunities to acquire student tickets given there are 4 different times throughout the day.

Those 4 times we propose to be evenly distributed over a 12-hour span starting at 8 AM, and

having spots at 11 AM, 2 PM, 5 PM eastern time. Along with this the number of tickets per

class, 4,200, will still remain the same each day, but among those 4 times only 1,050 will be

distributed out at each given time.

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How we concluded to come to this decision

Our philosophy in implementing these different times aims to give each student an even playing

field to acquire season tickets for football season. The times were well thought out in regards to

high volumes of students that would be on the site at the same time ensuring there would be a

second opportunity for students for them to get into a queue earlier, time zones for example,

accounting for east and west coast time zones. This solution was thoroughly thought out,

surveyed among people.

During our research of students who attempted to buy student tickets we also surveyed

students to see if they would make a change to the process. Our findings were quite interesting;

of the 19 students who answered “No” to the original question “Did you try to get football

tickets?”, 4 of them did not try and get tickets due to the difficulty with the process.

Students were surveyed if they were discouraged by the process due to its
difficulty of acquiring tickets. 21% replied “Yes”
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The results of this question from our survey, emphasizes the shortcomings of acquiring tickets,

by addressing the fact that anyone was discouraged by the fact that there was any difficulty

involved with the general process. This is an alarming fact as Penn State is a world famous

school and internationally recognized football program.

According to a Forbes article written in 2018 by Chris Smith, who was a former writer

specializing in SportsMoney, Penn State’s estimated annual revenue for the 2018 season was

valued at $92 million, which ranks 14th among the NCAA football programs, and third among

Big Ten conference teams.

Being that this article was from

2018, we can assume that Penn

State has generated increasing

revenue at an increasing rate.

The relation between this and

the access to tickets highlights

the influence and popularity

within the realm of NCAA

football programs.

The NCAA released their 2018 revenues and profit for overall
organizations. Photo from Chris Smith Forbes article, “College
Football's Most Valuable Teams: Texas A&M Jumps to No. 1.”

With respect to this article, we furthered in asking those original 126 participants who were a

part of the original study their opinion if Penn State should make a decision in the process of

getting tickets or not.

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The last question we asked was if the process needed to be changed. The
whole population of participants responded, of those 126, a majority 109
responded with “Yes”
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Conclusion

In this business report, we demonstrated the lack of availability of football tickets for students

here at Pennsylvania State University. Through our detailed solution, we believe that we can

improve the ticketing process resulting in benefiting the biggest population of students as

possible. We have provided a detailed plan for implementation as well as primary and

secondary research to support our need for change at this institution. We feel that we are a

qualified team to tackle this issue and implement the necessary alterations that are much

needed. We hereby formally ask for your approval to move forward with this project and improve

ourselves and our community.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our group leader, Megan

Holtzman, at 240-444-3209 or mth5398@psu.edu

Thank you for your consideration and I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Cole Bogner, Harrison Pierno, & Megan Holtzman

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References

Smith, Chris. “College Football's Most Valuable Teams: Texas A&M Jumps to No. 1.”
Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 25 Sept. 2018,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2018/09/11/college-footballs-most-valuable-
teams/?sh=55bb2bfe6c64
“Penn State and Ticketmaster to Expand Digital Ticketing Technology.” Penn State University
Athletics,gopsusports.com/news/2019/8/7/football-penn-state-and-ticketmaster-technolo
gy.aspx