Chancellor James L. Oblinger turned down a proposal by the Football Task Force, a committee appointed to create a more safe and enjoyable environment for attendees at home football games, for ‘pat downs’ upon admittance into the football stadium.

However, upon entering the home football game Saturday, students claim that they were patted down by Event One staff.

The Football Task Force, Campus Police and Athletics Department said they were unaware of this occurrence.

“I don’t know anything about anybody doing that,” Tom Stafford, co-chair of the Football Task Force and vice chancellor for student affairs said. “As a routine matter to check people in the stadium, the pat down was not supposed to be put into place.”

The purpose of a pat down, as performed upon entrance into NFL games, is to ensure that no weapons or items, such as alcohol, are admitted into the stadium with a spectator.

After police proposed the pat downs, the committee thoroughly discussed and recommended to Oblinger that the least-evasive level of pat downs be implemented for this season.

The pat down process proposed involves an Event One staff member of the same gender touching the person being admitted into the stadium to make sure they don’t have anything in their sleeves, pants, pockets or socks.

After receiving extensive feedback, Oblinger decided not to pass the pat down proposal.

“The idea about the pat down came up pretty late in the discussion of the committee and was after we had collected information from other places,” Stafford said.

According to Stafford, very few other universities enforce pat downs upon entrance into the stadiums.

The only instance that pat downs are allowed is when security has reason to think that somebody has something suspicious and are asked to remove it.

“There is not supposed to be a blanket enforcement of pat downs, so all students should definitely not be patted down,” Will Quick, student body president, said.

However, students claim that at Saturday’s game, they were patted down without reason, even by Event One staff members of the opposite gender.

“A female patted down my pockets and smoothed down my leg a little bit even after I had taken everything out of my pockets,” Mario Giammattei, a freshman in mechanical engineering, said. “I thought it was unnecessary and I didn’t like it. I don’t appreciate them not abiding by the law.”

Stephen Parker, a freshman in engineering, claims to have also been patted down by a female staff member before admittance into the student gates.

“I had taken everything out of my pockets beforehand, yet was still pat down by a female staff member,” he said. “They need to create separate lines between genders if they are going to pat people down. That’s against the law and they need to abide by that and the rules.”

Dick Christy, assistant athletics director of external operations, said the allegations will be looked into.

“No one can pat down if they are of the opposite sex,” he said. “It is obviously not what the procedure is, and we will definitely follow up with it.”

Quick indicated that the pat downs could have occurred due to miscommunication.

“It’s obviously not the rules, so whatever event staff member did that, if they did indeed do that, was probably misinformed of the regulations and needs to be told what they are,” he said. “We are going to look into it.”