Sugar Bowl officials spent part of yesterday "dealing with the fallout of a BCS championship ticket snafu that kept scores of angry fans out of Superdome seats for which they had paid hundreds of dollars," after the stadium’s top two rows were turned into a press overflow section for the Alabama-LSU game, according to Bruce Nolan of the New Orleans TIMES-PICAYUNE. Sugar Bowl Dir of Media Relations & Communications John Sudsbury said that the Sugar Bowl "scrambled to find substitute seating." But it "wasn’t always pretty." LSU fan Nena Tucker, who attended the game with her husband, five boys and her mother, said that the "best Superdome officials could do was give them six tickets, with poorer sight lines, in two separate sections -- both in the middle of the Alabama section." Tucker said that during the "two hours their family waited, she saw about 60 displaced people asking for some kind of seating solution." She added that stadium officials "seemed to be offering most people make-good tickets in scattered singles and pairs." In a "detailed email to a roster of Sugar Bowl officials, Tucker complained about the foul-up and added that ushers and customer service reps were at best unsympathetic to their problem and at worst downright rude." Tucker said that Sugar Bowl CEO Paul Hoolahan "contacted her Tuesday with an offer of full restitution and a set of tickets to next year’s Sugar Bowl" (New Orleans TIMES-PICAYUNE, 1/11).
