Students miss out on chance to root for Herd at UNC

One of the trademarks of the Thundering Herd football team is the massive cheering section that follows it to away games. Sometimes this cheering section is so large it can't even fit into the stadium.

This is the case with the team's Sept. 23 match-up with the North Carolina Tar Heels.

As reported in today's Page One story, the university dispensed all 5,500 tickets provided by UNC.

North Carolina sold out the remaining tickets as well.

Some of those probably went to Marshall fans who could not get tickets here.

Out of Marshall's 5,500 tickets, only 400 went to students. Those were gone by the first week of August, before fall classes resumed.

This means many students may not have even known the tickets were on sale. There were media announcements, but did they reach out-of-state students or people doing internships or on vacation?

We appreciate the ticket office negotiating good seats for 400 students.

We do not know all the details of the negotiations so we cannot say whether they could have gotten more.

But they could have delayed making the student tickets available until the majority of the student body were back on campus. The tickets obviously sold out quickly. There is no reason to think they would not have done so a few weeks later.

Marshall will once again make an impressive showing of fan support in an opponent's stadium.

It's just a shame more students didn't have a chance to be part of it.