With the NIU football team doing better than it has in years and soaring attendance rates at home football games, football tickets have been hard to come by.

Starting with the Iowa State game on Sept. 27, students have had to go to the Convocation Center and, most recently, the Holmes Student Center, to pick up their tickets for home football games.

Both locations have various hours when students can pick up tickets, but some students waited too long to get tickets for Saturday’s game against Western Michigan.

Max Bushmakin, a senior computer science major, was one of those students.

“When I went there, it was all sold out,” Bushmakin said. “I was very frustrated … I was not happy.”

Bushmakin said that he still tailgated, though, because he thinks it’s fun and his friends were there.

It wasn’t just students either. Many alumni also weren’t able to get tickets for the Homecoming game.

“A bunch of us were supposed to get tickets and it fell through,” said Debbie Hopp, an NIU communication major alumna. Hopp said she and her friends still were tailgating even though they didn’t have tickets because they came to DeKalb to visit each other.

Hopp said she probably would have bought a ticket from a scalper if she saw one and said she would have been willing to pay about $30 for it.

Mike Sterczek, a junior marketing major, who had a ticket for the game, also said that he would buy tickets from a scalper.

“If it was the only way to get it,” he said. Sterczek also said the most he would pay for a ticket would be $30.

NIU students weren’t the only ones who wanted tickets to the game on Saturday. The Homecoming game also drew students from other universities.

Jim Stacy, a sophomore political science major at Loyola University in Chicago, said he wasn’t able to get a ticket for the game, but was able to buy one from a scalper. He said he paid $10 (face value) for the ticket, but would have paid $15 or $20 if necessary.

Stacy said he came to the game “probably because Loyola doesn’t have a football team.”

Mike Nichol, a sophomore environmental engineering major at the University of Illinois, who was with Stacy, also bought a ticket for $10 from the same scalper.

Nichol said he was at the game because he went to high school with some players on Western Michigan’s team. He said the game was sold out and he couldn’t buy tickets.

Nichol said it took him and Stacy about 20 minutes to find someone to buy tickets from. Stacy and Nichol walked around holding up two fingers until they found someone with tickets to sell.

Some students, though, didn’t have to resort to buying scalped tickets for the game on Saturday.

“I’m a nerdy student, and I go really early to get my ticket,” said Heather Bailey, a sophomore elementary education major.