‘All Bark, No Bite’: Admin Threats Fail to Deter Black Market for Harvard-Yale Tickets

Five minutes after Dunster House resident Ada D. Vazzana ’26 sent an email over the House listserv offering to sell her Harvard-Yale football ticket for $55, she found her phone would not stop buzzing.

“I wasn’t expecting to get so many texts immediately, but I guess they really are that popular,” Vazzana said. “There was one person who — I said I had already sold it — and this person said, ‘I’ll offer you more to buy it.’”

Vazzana and other undergraduates are participating in what has become a biannual Harvard tradition: selling their Harvard-Yale tickets on the black market and ignoring administrators’ threats that doing so could result in disciplinary action.

Each undergraduate student is allotted one free ticket to The Game. House resident deans and academic coordinators have circulated messages to students that tickets are non-transferable and that students who buy or sell tickets will be referred to the Administrative Board, per policies outlined in the Harvard College student handbook.

But the warnings have not stopped students from flooding House listservs, GroupMe chats, and Sidechat with requests to buy or sell tickets.

Taruna Singh ’24-’25, an Adams House resident, sent an email to “Adams-Schmooze,” the House’s mailing list, that she would be willing to sell her ticket for the “best offer.”

“Immediately I got a bunch of emails,” Singh said. “I got $25, $50, $75, but I got $100 really quickly. It was the second email I got.”

Just minutes after writing that her highest offer was $100, Singh wrote to the mailing list that “We are not allowed to sell our tickets!!!!! No longer selling!!!!!”

Adams House Resident Dean Charles “Chip” Lockwood had replied to Singh’s initial email twice to threaten disciplinary action.

“I will need to report this to the Ad Board if you do not email Schmooze to say that you are no longer selling your ticket,” Lockwood wrote in his second email.

The warnings have not dissuaded many students from continuing to sell their Harvard-Yale tickets, often for steep prices.

The Harvard student section at the Harvard-Yale game in 2022. By Julian J. Giordano

Taj S. Gulati ’25, who circulated a widely-used public Google document to Eliot House students so they could list themselves as buyers or sellers of tickets, said the administration is “all bark, no bite” with its threats.

“If the administration went so far as to actually punish students for doing that, I think it would be extremely ridiculous,” Gulati said.

Harry R. Warfel ’26, a student in Quincy House, said that “the most I’ve heard anyone selling a ticket for was $125.”

Tickets to The Game are currently retailing on ticketing platforms such as Ticketmaster and Vivid Seats starting for $130.

Over Quincy’s “Qlubpenguin” mailing list, Warfel humorously responded to a warning email sent by Quincy Academic Coordinator James Simmons, writing that Quincy students were discussing tickets listed on Ticketmaster, rather than their official tickets given by the College.

“It appears that all tickets being discussed were actually tickets being resold through Ticketmaster — tickets that do not fall under the non-transferable athletic stipulation,” Warfel wrote.

In an interview with The Crimson, Warfel later said that he didn’t understand the strict response from House administrators.

“I just don’t get why they’re being so serious on something that is almost entirely non-enforceable,” Warfel said.

Winthrop House students have illustrated a similar level of humor in trying to get around the College’s policy.

After Winthrop Resident Dean Sarah Caughey wrote in a House-wide GroupMe chat that reselling tickets is prohibited, a student asked if they could “‘donate’ tickets and then have money ‘donated’ to you?”

Caughey did not reply to the student’s message.

Similar warning emails have been sent out by the Mather House Resident Dean and the Kirkland House Resident Dean to their House’s respective students.

A College spokesperson did not answer a question about whether students would be referred to the Ad Board for reselling tickets, instead referring a reporter to Harvard Athletics website’s ticket policy.

While Warfel said he is not worried about students getting punished for reselling their tickets, he expressed more concern about some of the exorbitant prices students were willing to pay for a Harvard-Yale ticket.

“If someone is purchasing a ticket for more than $160, I think they should have their admissions to the school revoked,” he said.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.

—Staff writer Adithya V. Madduri can be reached at adithya.madduri@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @adithyavmadduri.