Penn State student football tickets are a topic that has drawn attention in recent months. And it's safe to assume the subject will remain on the radar.

O.K., enough with the understatements.

You and all other Penn State students, whether a football fan or not, deserve to know how a matter so important to the collective student body, is handled each year. This column at this time cannot provide those answers for 2008, but it should certainly address whether or not the student body will have a say in the matter.

Check the box marked "Absolutely."

When I sat down this summer with Devon Lash, The Daily Collegian's Editor In Chief, I introduced the idea of designating our student newspaper as the clearinghouse for Penn State students to submit their ideas on how to best sell and distribute tickets next year.

With the Collegian as the front-line recipient of your feedback, many suggestions would likely hit the printed page for all to read and consider. Even those that don't make the final edition have at least been reviewed by your fellow students before being funneled to my office at Intercollegiate Athletics.

This process would also assist in alleviating your fear that a letter or e-mail that gets sent directly to Intercollegiate Athletics (ICA) somehow disappears into a black hole, never to resurface again.

Hopefully, many of you know that to not be the case via my responses and the responses of other ICA staff members in recent months.

Sending your thoughts to the Collegian will establish a pipeline of ideas and an organized means of getting some of those ideas heard and recorded. Athletics, then, will collect your thoughts directly from the Collegian for discussion, debate and decisions. Which is, of course, the most important part, correct? How are decisions to be made for next year's ticket sale?

Right now, it may seem to students that those calls are made in Oz, somewhere behind a blue curtain in the Bryce Jordan Center, with no one being quite sure who is pulling which levers on the student ticket process.

Let's establish something right now -- no more Oz.

The students will be represented at the table when the discussion is season tickets.

But, let's also be clear on another important point.

Input, suggestions and debate are welcome and healthy ingredients in this process, but yet, the final determination of how student ticket sales are handled next year cannot be established by a show of hands or the old call for "All those in favor? Those opposed?"

In the coming weeks, a group of students and other campus representatives will be invited and gathered to begin addressing some of the questions that emerged from this year's sale and from your suggestions.

In the course of doing so, there will be some fundamentals that the group must take into account. If you plan to offer your input, please plan to keep these same facts in mind:
The total number of student tickets -- 21,880, including the Blue Band -- will not increase. That does not eliminate options, however, that offer more than 21,880 students a chance to purchase a ticket.

The sale will take place online again, although before we all get too excited, that does not mean all tickets need to be offered at the same time to all students.

Options do exist.

The issue of purchasing a ticket for the sole purpose of reselling it at an absurd price needs addressed.

Because our ticket demand exceeds supply, we need to make sure students who want to attend the games get tickets. These items provide the foundation to build a solution around.
That solution won't please everyone, but it should be fair, as established by the collective student voice, to everyone.

Your collective, white-hot response to the introduction of a ticket lottery last spring reminded me that equal and fair are not the same thing.

A lottery provides everyone an equal chance. It's objective. You weren't interested in equal. You wanted fair and believed that the tried and true first-come, first-served method provides that.

Many of you (and your parents) have already registered your opinions and suggestions for change.

I thank you for those. Some of those ideas quickly went to the top of the "Considerations" list. I look forward to picking up my Daily Collegian and reading more so we can add to that list in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, on behalf of Penn State Athletics, thanks for putting the Nittany Lions at the top of another, more meaningful, list by any standard -- finest student fans anywhere in the country.

Wherever you are at 6 p.m. tomorrow, I hope you'll be wearing white.

Greg Myford is the associate athletic director of marketing and communication. His e-mail address is gjm14@psu.edu.