(U-WIRE) PITTSBURGH — University of Pittsburgh student Marc Gutowski had been waiting a long time to see the Pitt football team play the University of Notre Dame.

The Pitt season-ticket holder even got to Heinz Field, where Pitt plays, an hour and a half before Saturday's kickoff to claim his seat.

Despite his careful planning, he didn't get to see much of the game.

Gutowski had picked up standing-room tickets for a few of his friends. A few minutes before kickoff, he left his girlfriend, Melanie Linn, to save his seat and went down to the gates to give his friends their tickets.

"It was one of the games I really wanted to go see," he says.

He thought it was going to take about five minutes to bring the tickets to his friends and return to his seat, but when he tried to return to his seat, the stadium's guards told him that he couldn't.

"As soon as we left to go to the bathroom or concessions, you gave up your seat," Gutowski said the guards told him.

This is not a new problem, according to Carol Sprague, Pitt's senior associate athletics director.

At Heinz Field, there are three student-seating levels on the 100, 200 and 500 levels. Most students want to sit as close as they can to the field, so more students than there are seats for go down to the lower seating areas, she says.

"It was not a surprise," she said of Saturday's seating crunch.

When Pitt played in Three Rivers Stadium, where the NFL's Pittsburgh Steelers formally played, they had similar problems, she said.

"What happened at the game was not unlike what happened at Three Rivers Stadium games when it was sold out," she said. "It just took longer (to deal with it) because of the magnitude of it."

Pitt Police Chief Tim Delaney added that this type of problem also occurred when Pitt played in Panther Stadium years ago.

Because of the lack of seating in the lower areas on Saturday, students began to stand in the aisles. The fire marshal then asked for the aisles to be cleared because the students were violating fire-safety regulations.

Around kickoff time, a Heinz Field official called Delaney to report the problem. This was the first complaint Delaney has gotten from stadium officials in the three years Pitt has played there.

When he arrived, he looked at the lower seating levels, which were completely filled. He said that the seating sections were so packed that they appeared to be one large section.

According to Delaney, Pitt's team was driving the ball toward the end zone on the students' end of the field. Since the students were excited, he did not want to send his officers down into the large crowd. After the play, the officers went down and told students to get out of the aisles.

The officers did not care if more than one student was standing in front of each seat, so long as no one was in the aisles, Delaney says.

"We weren't doing a headcount," he added.

While the police officers cleared the aisles, security guards did not let any students in, Sprague said.

According to Gutowski, a guard told him Pitt had oversold the student section by 3,000 seats.

Sprague and Delaney could not confirm this.

Even though Gutowski already had a seat, and Linn had saved it for him, he couldn't go back in.

"It basically ruined the whole game," Linn said. "It was just a bad situation all around."

Though he said he didn't blame the event staff, he said Pitt should have done a better job managing the ticket sales.

"We took the brunt of it," he said. "I paid money for the tickets. I expected to see the game."

By halftime, the guards let him and others back into the stands.

"It's kind of crappy," he said. "The only two scores, I missed."

"They'd never do this to a section where they paid real money," he said, referring to non-student ticket sections. "It shows how much the University really cares for us."

When people left their seats during halftime, they got their hands stamped so they could return to their seats without any trouble. According to Delaney, there were no major problems after they began stamping people's hands.

Delaney said he had heard that some students were separated from their friends at the game, but he was interested in keeping everyone safe.

He said that there were many students who arrived more than an hour before the game, and there were also students who arrived much later who went to sit closer to the field. Delaney and his officers could not tell which students were which.

According to Sprague, after the game, a focus group looks into all of the complaints the university receives. There weren't more than the normal amount of complaints filed from people sitting in the non-student sections on Saturday.

The committee is, however, going to look into possible solutions for this problem so that it does not occur during the next Pitt home game, which is in about two weeks.

Delaney suggested a few solutions: stamping students' hands at the beginning of the game, giving students bracelets or assigning seats so that students coming late in the game would not take the seats of students who came early.

— Katie Leonard