Yesterday, the athletic department, apparently ahead of schedule, released some new information about the 2013 men's basketball reseating policy and procedure. There were a couple of significant changes:
- Reseating will take place every year now.
- Instead of selecting your own seats, you will be providing the athletic department with "detailed preferences" as to your choice of seats, and then the athletic department will make the final choice for you.
I know, right? Pretty big change. Honestly, I was expecting the move to every year eventually given the setup of how the priority point system works as far as more points for money donated during the current seating period. Oh, you were more concerned with the second one. Right.
It seems obvious that providing preferences and having the athletic department make the final decision for seats isn't a great way to do things. It takes away our ability to know exactly what seats we're getting and it causes the athletic department to do way more work by having to sift through all of the entries and do all the seating themselves. So it's not terribly surprising for this line to be in the letter from Deputy Athletic Director Mike Broeker that I linked to above (emphasis is mine) :
In order to protect the tax deductibility of your seat donations, we are required to conduct reseating on an annual basis with the following modifications:
So it's either a change in the tax code or a change in how the university is interpreting the tax code that caused this. Either way, if this is how reseating has to be done in order to comply with charitable donations deduction requirements, then that's the way it is. Our crack research team spent hours yesterday attempting to figure out the charitable donations section of the tax code and all I got from them was a smashed laptop and a resignation letter scribbled in crayon, so I can't provide more insight on this issue. All I can guess is that there's a lot more Marquette fans in favor of abolishing the tax code in favor of a national sales tax right now.
Let's turn our attention to the idea of the "detailed preferences." If you check out this picture from the athletics website, you'll see that you're still going to be providing the exact seats that you want from the computer system. I can't help but look at this and then read the letter from Broeker and the FAQ that goes along with it and see "You give us your DETAILED PREFERENCE *WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE* for seats, but we'll make the final selection. GET IT?" Am I wrong? Maybe. But maybe not.
The important thing to remember is that this whole thing isn't going to take place for another eight months. That's more than enough time for you to pick up the phone or fire up your email and get in touch with your favorite athletic department employee and ask them for details.
Questions? Complaints? Like typing things? Hit the comments section to vent all you like.