Selling out a football stadium is hard enough. Selling out one that holds nearly 102,000 people, week after week and year after year, is the kind of thing most athletic departments never get to experience. Tennessee has done it 28 straight times heading into Saturday against Kennesaw State, and the number that is just as impressive is not the number of people in seats.
Danny White joined the Mike Keith Show, and presented an enormous number that is on the season ticket wait list.
“We have 29,400 accounts on a waiting list,” White said. “We average three and a half tickets an account. The passion is really, I think, it’s unparalleled.”
Nearly 30,000 accounts, most of them wanting three or more seats apiece, all of them waiting on a building that is already full well before the gates open on game day.
The students are in the same spot. Tennessee runs an average of about 20,000 students who want to be there on a given Saturday, and the student section only holds 12,000 of them.
“About 20,000 want to come, so we need more student seats,” White said. That is thousands of students every week who cannot get a seat, and it is a good reminder that this demand is not just old money and long-held accounts.
White has been around long enough to admit that even he did not see this coming as fast as it did. Asked about the goals he set when he arrived in 2021, he did not pretend that he knew it would be like this. He admittedly underestimated Vol Nation.
Even seeing the takeovers on the road, just tells how much this fanbase loves their team. He even noted that due to the difficulty of getting into Neyland, that road opportunities may be the only time Tennessee fans get to witness the Vols in person. That is a telling statement of its own.
The hard part is that wanting to add seats and being able to add them are two different things. “We’d love to,” White said of adding on. “I think the only place to do it is in that north end zone, if we were going to add seats.”
There is another side to it too, and White, who was a marketing major who took econ, does not hide from it. More seats sold at face value means more fans getting in the honest way and a little less air in the resale market. Look at the Texas game on Sept. 26. A single ticket is currently going for $420 on Vivid Seats and around the same on Ticketmaster.
“It would also maybe help drive down the secondary market a little bit if we add a little more supply,” White said. He quickly pumped the brakes on any timeline, though. “It’s certainly not a quick and easy project,” White said.
It is not only a football thing, either. Across campus at Sherri Parker Lee Stadium, where Tennessee softball plays in front of 2,200 fans, there is a waiting list too. Karen Weekly has watched that building fill up the same way since its opening 18 years ago.
“Well, we definitely should have built this stadium a whole lot bigger than we did,” Weekly said in June. “We certainly thought back in 2008 that a place that could seat a couple thousand, it wasn’t going to get filled like it does, but we’ve been busting at the seams in this place and it just gets better every year.”
So for now the waiting list keeps growing, and that is a number worth watching. Plenty of programs can fill their stadium on a good Saturday. Very few have almost 30,000 accounts standing in line for seats that do not exist yet. That is where Tennessee football sits right now, and it is the kind of problem a lot of people around the country would love to have.
