The Reasons You Land in the End Zone

There's a fiendish simplicity to the way the Harvard Department of Athletics doles out undergraduate football tickets, and a fiendish simplicity to the mathematics that leave Freshmen and many others unhappy with their seat locations.

About 6000 seats, ranging from excellent to abysmal, are set aside for undergraduates in sections 33 to 37 of Soldiers Field, from the 35 yard line to the end zone. For Saturday's battle with Dartmouth the ticket office received more than 8000 applications.

Freshmen again this year will be wedged into temporary bleachers at the open end of the field. They are low men on the priority totem pole which goes strictly according to class.

The ticket office doesn't try to arbitrate whether a seat in row MM of section 35 is better than one in row G of section 33. So seniors are put in the two sections closest to midfield, juniors next and sophomores against the wall behind the goalline. So a senior can end up in row E peering between shoulder pads on the Crimson bench.

There's no way you can ace out your classmates for the good seats up high. The Department of Athletics collects the applications in bundles of 50 as they come in, and then pulls the bundles t random as they make the seat assignments.

"We try to hold out the lower rows, A and B, and give those out last or not at all," ticket manager Gordon Page, said yesterday. "A lot of people say they would rather have high seats than ones close to the middle of the field, but we only have so many to distribute."

Page added that "Up until two or three years ago, we never had more than 5200 applications, but now for all big games we have so many that we have to put Freshmen in the end zone. Once we tried putting a few of them in the permanent stands, but that caused so much ill feeling that we put them all together out there now."