The student section reacts after Notre Dame head coach Mike Brey received technical foul when the Terps upset the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, 74-66, on Jan 15, 2014 at Comcast Center.

The student section reacts after Notre Dame head coach Mike Brey received technical foul when the Terps upset the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, 74-66, on Jan 15, 2014 at Comcast Center.

College basketball season’s only a week away, and students are getting so hype that Maryland’s athletic department is taking note.

This season, the department will be raffling tickets to men’s basketball’s first three home games — Southern New Hampshire (exhibition), Mount St. Mary’s and Georgetown — if more students request tickets than there are seats available.

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The twist? The lottery will be based on class year, with the number of lottery entries allocated as follows: seniors — 4 entries, juniors — 3, sophomores — 2 and freshmen — 1.

Graduate students receive one entry each in a drawing for, as a group, 10 percent of student tickets.

The athletic department chose to test this method after presenting it to the Student Government Association, which opted for the method over a straight random lottery.

“There was no policy on this previously and it’s never happened before,” said Matt Monroe, assistant athletic director for ticket services, on the anticipated higher student ticket demand this season. “Rather than arbitrarily making a decision about who gets a ticket and who doesn’t, we wanted to put it in our policy.”

Because student seats didn’t sell out for the Terrapins’ exhibition game against Southern New Hampshire on Nov. 6, every student who requested a ticket received one. The department created this policy to disburse tickets in the event the next two matchups — Georgetown in particular — will be more heavily attended.

Starting with the fourth home game of the season, Rider on Nov. 20, students will begin receiving tickets based on the usual loyalty point system, which will only kick in if more students want to attend a game than the department has tickets for.

Students earn points for attending the first three games; points go toward receiving tickets for later games that require the loyalty system.

The top 25 percent of point earners automatically receive a ticket. The remaining 75 percent of tickets will be given from a points-based lottery.

“If you have eight points, your name is entered in [the lottery] eight times. If you have two points, your name is entered in twice,” Monroe said. “Even if you haven’t been to a game yet and you request a ticket, your name is entered one time.”

CLARIFICATION: A sentence in a previous version of this story made it sound like graduate students were looped into the lottery with undergraduates. The sentence has been updated to fix any confusion.

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