One of the most important events of the school year is the Tommie-Johnnie football game. A game where the playing field is somewhat equal, assuming the Tommies won’t beat the opponent 55 to zero. A game students actually care to attend. Additionally, it was one of the the last TOJO games, given our potential shift to Division I sports.

Yet, it seems that St. Thomas only cares about its financial gain.

Due to a ticket limit set by the university, student tickets ran out quickly. For undergraduate seniors, tickets were sold out in an hour and seven minutes. For sophomores, tickets sold out in 44 minutes. Each grade level was allotted the same number of tickets, and each grade level sold out.

Did St. Thomas reserve a ticket number equal to the amount of its undergraduate student population or at least take into account the amount of student interest in the event? After crunching some answers, I believe the answer is yes.

Allianz Field’s seat capacity is 19,400. The population of undergraduate students at the University of St. Thomas is 6,200. The combined population of undergraduate students at St. John’s and St. Ben’s is 3,621. If both schools reserved a seat for every undergraduate student, there would still be 9,580 seats leftover.

St. Thomas, conversely, reserved seven hundred tickets per undergraduate class, totaling to 2,800 tickets for student body nearly two and a half times the size. This left 3,399 undergraduate students to find a ticket or go without one entirely. The only other option was to buy a ticket at the non-student price of $87 or buying a ticket second-hand for upward of a hundred dollars.

Maybe I’m being unrealistic. There’s no way every undergraduate student will go or be interested in going to TOJO. However, St. Thomas could have gone in a more student-friendly route. They could have alerted the students about ticket deadlines. After that, the remaining tickets could be sold to alumni and the general public. They could have made their cake and eaten it too.

Instead, St. Thomas lost focus of TOJO’s meaning to undergraduates. They focused instead on making money through selling tickets to alumni and the general audience. The theme of revenue over student well-being has occurred throughout my years at St. Thomas. So often St. Thomas loses focus on events for undergraduate student enjoyment and entertainment. Instead, St. Thomas’s focus often lies on revenue and making alumni happy.

Never before this TOJO has St. Thomas showed its hand in its priorities this transparently.

True Dabill can be reached at dabi7280@stthomas.edu.