Tickets for next month's Ohio State / Texas bowl game have been selling slower than in years past. Tickets went on sale in early December but there are still many available. The lower demand has put students in an unusual position.
OSU tickets are usually allocated for bowl games through a lottery system because there's more student demand than there are tickets. So this year senior Maggie Hegemier signed up.
"I actually didn't think that I was actually buying the ticket," Hegemier said. "I thought there was going to be a drawing. But I entered into the drawing I thought for my roommates because they wanted to go and I wanted to enhance their chance of winning the tickets since there had been drawings in years past."
As it turned out, Hegemier "won" a ticket. But now her roommate's decided not to go and she's stuck with the $155 for the ticket. And the ticket is non-refundable.
Ohio State's director for ticketing Bill Jones says the athletic department usually uses a lottery system for students. But he says this year there was no need for one.
"We typically have one because the demand is generally greater than the allocation for a specific group," Jones says. "But this year we did not have a lottery because we had more tickets in the allotment for students than we had requests. So every student got tickets."
Ohio State was allotted 17,500 tickets by Fiesta Bowl officials. Fewer than a thousand students will attend the event near Phoenix. Hegemier says she's trying to sell her ticket but so far has not been able to recoup the cost. Even ticket agencies don't want it. She says she blames herself for not reading the fine print.
"I mean it's my own fault, I shouldn't have entered into it," she says. "It still kind of sucks that they still charge you even if you don't pick up the ticket."
In a normal year Hegemier would not have had a problem finding a buyer. The last time the Buckeyes played in Arizona - the 2007 championship game - students only had a one in six chance of getting a ticket through the lottery. But a weak economy and OSU's fifth trip to the Fiesta Bowl in eight years has made tickets easy to come by.