Our athletic ticketing system for football is a mess. Actually, a lot of things don’t seem to work as they should when it comes to football.

At kickoff, event staff had scanned about 4,890 out of the 6,974 student tickets processed for the Sept. 20 game against East Carolina. There’s also the shortage of port-a-johns in the parking lots and the excess of some of our fans’ classless gestures towards the visiting fans.

These were the problems Student Government’s Ticketing Task Force addressed at its emergency meeting Wednesday night. And students will still have to put up with these problems at football games until we stop complaining and start coming up with solutions.

The most obvious problem is getting people in the stands ­ while more students are getting into the game on time, a significant percentage of students isn’t in the stands at kickoff. Student Senators and SG executives proposed a few solutions, many of which involved offering incentives to students in order to get them into the stadium earlier.

Giving free stuff away is always a good way to get students to do stuff, but it might not be the solution. People want to tailgate and may not be willing to sacrifice a game day tradition for a coupon or other giveaway.

While ticketing may be the most obvious area for improvement, it will be difficult to get anything substantive done. The port-a-john problem, however, is something we can solve quickly.

There was a gross shortage of restroom facilities available to tailgaters, and police at the event used this to hand out tickets for people who couldn’t wait for the 20 or 30 other people in the line to do their business.

What’s next? Will the police hand out citations for people burping or knocking over other people’s drinks? After all, you are stealing and willfully wasting someone else’s beverage. No, the only real crime going on here is the lack of proper facilities ­ so provide them for us.

I’m not sure if there’s any way to deal with our fans throwing classless remarks at visiting fans. Jay Dawkins, the student body president, suggested having student leaders walk with visiting fans to the gates and setting an example for our fans by treating visiting fans as guests. In the land of puppy dog eyes, free beer and an unending N.C. State football winning streak, that might work ­ in the real world… not so much.

But the real problem was the lack of students at the Ticketing Task Force’s meeting. There is no way student leaders can read our minds and conjure up solutions that magically make all the problems at football games disappear.

If we care about football and are sick of all the hassles at the games, we must show how much we want solutions and start working to implement them.

E-mail your thoughts about game day problems to [email protected].