Penn State Athletics announced last week that it would offer second-chance student tickets for the 2026 Penn State football season. However, the tickets were for Section 404, not the student section.

There were a few good aspects of these second-chance tickets, including that students who sell them will have them revoked, but the best part is that Penn State reverted to its glory days of first-come, first-served. Students who woke up at 7:30 a.m. on September 3 to load into Ticketmaster’s queue were rewarded with tickets for their efforts.

For some reason, that has not been the case for student section season tickets in the past two seasons and the current one.

Penn State has used a ticket lottery process for student football tickets since 2024, and the days of 7 a.m. wake-ups to log into Ticketmaster on multiple devices are long gone; in fact, the class of 2027 is the last class to experience the stress of those random summer mornings.

This relatively new system is flawed.

Anyone with a Penn State email has the same odds of getting the student football ticket package, no matter how big a fan they are or how many games they can actually attend.

I’m not here to advocate for the old system — though it did favor those with an unwavering passion for Penn State football. They had to sit through Ticketmaster nonsense, bite their nails, and hope they would land a good spot in the queue. My proposal takes a different approach to student tickets.

Penn State Athletics should complicate things. Weed out the real fans from those who wish to resell their tickets for triple the price they got them for — which, I should mention, credit to Penn State, hasn’t changed from the $246 it was my freshman year in 2023.

The proposal features two selection processes: one for six regular-season games and one for the White Out.

In the first, you can select one of two packages, with each package including three different regular-season games and costing $150. The tickets will be transferable, but must be traded one-for-one for a ticket from the other package, giving students some freedom without creating a full marketplace.

Theoretically, the 2026 package would have looked like this:
Package one: Marshall (home opener), Purdue, Minnesota.
Package two: Buffalo, Wisconsin, Rutgers.

Pat Kraft and Co. can deliberate on how to split the packages evenly, but I think the home-opener package should feature less-favorable Big Ten matchups, while the package with the next-best Big Ten matchup should include the Thanksgiving game, which many skip.

For the second (and more anticipated) selection process, the White Out ticket, Penn State Athletics should reintroduce Ticketmaster chaos to students because it builds character and allows devoted fans to get tickets. Here’s the real kicker: White Out tickets will be non-transferable.

Price them at $100 a pop because, even though students may pay more for fewer games under this proposal, they won’t be bidding on season tickets through Discord for hundreds of dollars more than what they paid. Additionally, the disappointment of missing out on a full season ticket package because you didn’t win the lottery outweighs the price difference.