Students wait outside of Comcast Center early on Sept. 9 for tickets to the Sept. 21 Terrapins-West Virginia football game at M&T Bank Stadium.
A line of several hundred students wrapped around the entryway of Comcast Center on Monday morning, spilling down the arena’s front steps and into the parking lot — but they weren’t there for a basketball game.
The athletic department announced last week it would offer a limited number of complimentary tickets for the Sept. 21 Terrapins football game against West Virginia in Baltimore, and students were waiting to snatch them up.
Dylan French, a junior economics major, was the first in line. He arrived at the building’s ticket office around 5:10 a.m., when the campus was still under the cover of darkness.
“I really thought there might be a few people here before me, but there weren’t,” French said, adding he had hoped to be the first person up.
French has built somewhat of a reputation for beating other students to the punch at in-demand athletic events. He was also the first student in line in February, when a longer stream of his peers wound all the way around the arena to get prime seating for the men’s basketball game against Duke.
The university made 1,000 complimentary tickets and 2,500 $10 tickets available to students for the M&T Bank Stadium game, said Matt Monroe, assistant athletics director for ticket services. As of 8 p.m. Monday, about 2,500 tickets — 85 of which were complimentary — were left, Monroe said. Some students bought the $10 tickets so they could sit with friends or guests, he said.
With a relatively healthy roster and two dominant nonconference games to open the Terps’ 2013 campaign, those at the line’s front offered tempered optimism about the season.
“They were both tune-up games. If that kind of result didn’t happen, we’d be in big trouble,” said Nathan Cloeter, a senior materials science and engineering major. But prior areas of concern — the offensive line, quarterback C.J. Brown’s health and an inexperienced defense — have been reassuring this season, he said.
“Two wins are two wins,” senior English major Abby Bjork said. “They haven’t been against as strong competition as WVU, so I think that it’ll be interesting to see us put against something that might be considered worthy competition.”
Monroe said fan enthusiasm has, to an extent, manifested itself in student attendance thus far. The first game of the season — in this case, against Florida International on Aug. 31 — usually outdoes the second game. That happened again this year, Monroe said, but the drop-off was less significant than in recent seasons.
The university has not sold its full stock of tickets for the West Virginia contest, though Monroe said total sales for the game have been pretty good overall.
“Our excitement is there for the season,” he said, “and that’ll continue once we get into conference play.”
