When the Student Government Association claimed they had modeled the new “Diehard Dog” shirts after Boston College’s Superfan shirts, they obviously lost a couple key points in translation.

The entire purpose of the Superfan shirt is to create a large crowd which is unified by a single appearance. I won’t say the effect is intimidating, because nothing about BC is intimidating, but it is a sight to behold when three or four thousand people are all wearing the same shirt, cheering for their team. Why, then, on a day when high attendance at the football and hockey games was virtually assured, would SGA decide to bring a mere 200 shirts to each event?

Parson’s Field actually sold out for the first time in recent memory, with more than 6,500 fans in attendance. By a conservative estimate, one-fifth of those attending were students. That means SGA needed to supply 1,300 shirts for the football game alone. With only 200 – that’s 15 percent – of our raucous student fans at the game equipped with these shirts, the effect was hardly impressive.

Later, I arrived at the hockey game nearly 45 minutes early, only to see, yet again, that no shirts were available. Sadly, I see SGA senators wearing the shirts every day, but for some reason, many don’t ever seem to make it to the games. Moreover, the mere fact that SGA is suggesting they will charge for these shirts in the future irks me.

Last year, I went to the first football game and got my free Northeastern-supplied athletics shirt. I wore it the rest of the year. Sure, it didn’t feature a supremely buff husky bursting through the front, but at least I had a free shirt that I could wear with the other 1,200 student fans at games. It’s frustrating that the system which worked so well last year was meddled with and subsequently broken by a seemingly overzealous SGA.

The claimed purpose of these shirts is supposed to be to increase school spirit. How is it helping our already-fractured student body if, out of 14,000 total undergrads at Northeastern, there are 400 shirts available?

Perhaps our senators need to take a couple of economics courses – when demand is high, it’s time to increase supply.

– Marcus Moche is a sophomore mechanical engineering major.