It’s been more than a decade since fewer than 100,000 people crammed into Ohio Stadium to cheer on the Buckeyes for a home game. Now the university is trying to capitalize: the Board of Trustees on Friday voted to increase football ticket prices from $70 to $79, and to introduce premium ticket pricing.

Premium ticket pricing is charging a different ticket price depending on the game.

Charlie Wilson is a law professor at OSU who chairs the university’s Athletic Council. It recently voted to put the proposal before the board of trustees.

It lets the university designate two “premium” games a year with tickets as much as $150. If the university opts for just one premium game a year, prices could go up to $175 a ticket.

It’s a first for OSU, but Wilson says as far as he knows, OSU is the only major college football program without premium pricing. It’s common in basketball, too.

“This last year, Ohio State played at the University of Kansas. There, their cheapest tickets were going for $80…this is for basketball. Whereas when Kansas came to play Ohio State this year, the ticket prices were the same regardless. The University of Kansas game was no-more expensive,” Wilson says.

Wilson declined to endorse or criticize the proposal, only saying a lack of premium pricing leaves a lot of money on the table.

“Big-time college sports have been highly commercialized, and now it’s simply out of control in terms of commercialism,” says Allen Sack, a professor of Sports Management at the University of New Haven and a defensive end on the 1966 Notre Dame national championship team.

He’s also a founding member of the Drake Group, an association of college faculty that, according to its mission statement, “defends academic integrity in higher education from the corrosive aspects of commercialized college sports.”

What has happened is as you become more commercialized, the pressure of winning is so intense on the coaches that it’s pushed down onto the athletes, the athletes have greater pressure, you have more cheating, you have more phantom courses, you have more paper courses where you don’t even show up and you supposedly write a paper and you get A’s.

No Ohio State trustees responded to requests for comment on this story.

Judging by internet message boards and the comments on news stories, most OSU fans seem to be against the price hike.

Walking to class, OSU student Kevin Speroff says any increase in ticket prices is unfortunate. But he’s hopeful higher prices for the general public might mean less public demand and more tickets for students, who would not be subject to premium pricing.

“You know a lot of schools have really, really cheap tickets for the students, and we can’t really afford expensive football games and stuff, but we want to get out there and see all that.”

Speroff says the price hike could also push him to scalp his tickets if demand increases enough. Even with premium pricing, prices at the ticket window won’t even begin to approach what scalpers can sometimes fetch on the open market. Tickets for the OSU-Michigan game can reach into the thousands of dollars.

“We are not only protecting our assets, we are protecting our ability to be competitive,” OSU President E. Gordon Gee said.

After hearing from Ohio State President Gordon Gee and the institution’s top financial advisers, the board of trustees agreed leasing its parking operations to a private company is in the school’s best interest.

In exchange for handing over its parking system to Australian firm QIC Global Infrastructure for the next 50 years, Ohio State will get a lump-sum payment of $483 million.

OSU officials say the money, once invested, will increase its endowment by nearly $5 billion and generate $3 billion in interest income.

OSU Chief Financial Officer Geoff Chatas said the funds will act as a fiscal safety net.

“If we do face financial issues because we have less state or federal support, these funds can also be there to help us bridge gaps we may have in the future,” Chatas said.

OSU has designated the money to support – among other things – faculty salaries and research, increase student aid and help pay for the university’s bus services, which will not be operated by the private company.

The university isn’t giving up all its rights to operate traffic and parking.

OSU can choose up to 220 events a year, such as move-in day or special events at the Schottenstein Center, where it can manage parking; although Ohio State would be required to reimburse the private operator for out-of-pocket costs if the university plans to keep any revenue from the event. And, in some cases, OSU would have to share revenue from the events.

Some students and faculty have expressed concerns about increased privatization at a land-grant institution.

But head of QIC Global Infrastructure, Ross Israel, said he wants to assure skeptics the company is committed to delivering the same level of service they’ve had in the past.

“We’re not looking to make any changes to how the permit system runs and the nature of what people have experienced. If anything, we’re trying to work with them to improve that service over time,” Israel said.

As part of the deal, QIC will not increase parking rates by more than 5.5 percent each year during the first ten years of the arrangement.

QIC will be responsible for all capital improvements to parking lots and garages, while Ohio State must maintain the roads.

The transition is expected to begin in late September and continue through the end of the year.

Current OSU traffic and parking workers have the option to stay on with the university or work for the parking operator.

Robert Schottenstein takes on his new job after chairing a trustee committee that led the university’s response to the Ohio State football team’s memorabilia scandal.

The board voted Friday to promote Schottenstein, board chairman, chief executive officer and president of M/I Homes, Inc.

He replaces current chairman Les Wexner, the billionaire chairman and founder of Limited Brands and a major donor to the university.

OSU trustees also voted Friday to rename the university’s medical center in honor of Limited Brands founder and longtime university supporter Les Wexner.

The announcement Friday came almost exactly a year after Wexner donated $100 million to the medical center, one of the largest such gifts ever to a public university.

Wexner also helped fund the Wexner Center for the Arts, named for his father.

The medical center will now be known as the Wexner Medical Center at The Ohio State University.

Wexner has donated more than $200 million to Ohio State and helped raise hundreds of millions more.