Believe it or not, you can still buy tickets to the Vols’ home games against Florida or Alabama if you’ll purchase them along with tickets to two other home games. Now no doubt some of that is due to a cooling of Urnge Ardor after a few seasons of mediocrity. And I understand that some of it is due to Florida returning some of its ticket allotment. Nevertheless, I don’t care how tough times have gotten, Alabama-Tennessee should always be a sell out.
Perhaps it’s time for Slive and the presidents to worry a little bit about whether they’re looking at a canary in the coal mine here.
Get The Picture 
I can’t speak for what the tailgating experience is like at UT now (haven’t been there since Hobnail Boot), but if it’s changed anything like the way UGA has, then I can understand why they don’t sell as many tickets. Between the tailgating regulations and HD television, it’s just a lot more enticing to stay at home on gameday.
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And seating in neyland stadium is equivalent to being mashed into a sardine can. Plus, the traffic control after the game is terrible. On my 1 visit to ut I enjoyed the pre-game activities and bar-hopping, but from the minute I set foot in the stadium until we finally got the car on I-75 heading south, the fan experience was pure hell.
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I dunno, 93. The Game is still The Game. Football exists for football’s sake, not beers and grills and campers and frisbees. Alabama v. Tennessee should never not sell out. I think the Urnge fanbase is declaring their displeasure with SOD a bit plus choosing not to see a sure loss in the face of tight purse strings at home. I don’t think tailgating has a thing to do with it.
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I don’t disagree with your points. Just saying that if you’re digging deeper into why Bama/UT isn’t sold out (the Senator made the point re: SOD already, which is why I didn’t mention it), I think you have to factor in the tailgating experience. Listen, we all know the game is the most important thing. Or at least it should be. But there is a significant portion of every fanbase that goes to the game for both the tailgating and the game itself. If it’s a pain in the ass (or expensive) to park, meet up with your normal tailgate group, and you have to sit in tons of traffic before & after, physically being at the Bama/UT game may not be worth it for a lot of folks. Not to mention the awful seating as noted above by W. Cobb Dawg.
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I certainly agree about the seating. It’s one thing to say your stadium holds 100,000+ people. It’s a whole different matter to seat 100,000 comfortably. I have sat in the nosebleeds where we were shoehorned in, and I have sat in the lower bowl, 40 yard line UT fancy pants seats… big difference. Heck, I bet they could squish another 3,000 in down there… but I digress.
I just don’t know that I want to live in a world where UT v. Bama doesn’t sell out, not because of tailgating anyway.
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I think Tennessee’s whole current situation is a canary.
Lots of messages to read from the last few years in Knoxville.
Leadership, management, decision making…Tennessee is headed toward poster-boy status for what not to do with a successful football program. Especially if they make yet another coaching change at the end of this season. As someone pointed out here recently, the Vols’ slide started something like 14 years ago.
So, to answer the question, is not selling out for Bama a canary?
It is more like a canary for the canary’s canary.
I doubt any athletic administrator in the conference, or anybody in the conference office is unaware of the multiple messages in Tennessee’s decline.
But to answer your question directly, not selling out Bama could be a sign college football is overexposed. I would say a similar non-sellout at somewhere there is a bit more consistent success would be more indicative of this.
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But Tennessee still makes me nervous.
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sigh.
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They will make me worry the week we play them, not before. I am confident about Mizzou, but I am worried about them now because they are next up at the plate. From a seasonal standpoint, Mizzou has always worried me more than TN ever since the schedule was decided. We will beat TN when the time comes.
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Hey look guys, I was raised at the knees, football-wise, of Wally and Vince and Larry Munson…how could I not be nervous? “Background is hard to escape.”
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I know, I know, I always see a black cloud on the horizon even when the current weather is good. It only takes one injury, one mistake, one bad call, one_________ (whatever), to change the direction a season might go. After decades of Larry and Vince it is in our DNA.
But I also see breaks in the clouds when the storm is raging and everyone is calling for CMR’s head. It is a balance thing. You are right to be cautious with your outlook, this sport is very cyclical with dramatic peaks and valleys. It may be why I keep the Macallan close by, or that is my story anyway.
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Watching on TV is convenient/cheap/comfortable but it cannot in any way, shape, or form.. replace the actual experience of being in the stadium cheering on your team.
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Agree totally; there is nothing like being there. Especially for me, since I live out of state, and all my college friends attend every home game so I get to see everyone.
But, when ticket prices are high, hotels are hard to come by, it becomes so cumbersome to get to the game and get home, you get hassled by crazy tailgate rules and overzealous cops who want to hand out open possession tickets if you step off a certain sidewalk the wrong way with a beer in your hand, being there starts to look less and less attractive. Combine this with incredible HD TV with DVR, my own beer fridge, my own food, air conditioning, all while saving several hundred dollars and seven hours of drive time, you can see where some fans may start making different choices about gameday.
The canary is there, and he is getting sleepy. I wonder if schools respond, or if they simply count their TV money and stand pat with how they do things.
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Sadly, I think this is the plan.
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I think a lot of schools, UT included, built their stadiums out to bandwagon capacity. By that I mean they could get their normal strong fanbase plus any of the bandwagon fans that come along during periods of high success. When the program goes off the rails a bit, the bandwagon fans are the first to jump off. All that being said, to have tickets remaining for the Alabama game is alarming.
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I think the same can be said for Sanford Stadium. There will be plenty of empty seats for several home games this year. Even when the games are techinically sold out, there’s a big difference between a sellout and a hard sellout. I am not crazy about the 600 level addition as the seats are awful and I think it’s good to have a completely packed house if you can get it. Kind of like a rock band playing at Philips Arena even though they could still sell 5,000 more seats if they played at the Georgia Dome. Better to have a full house.
To put it another way, it’s not the folks inside the stadium that drive secondary prices. It’s how many are OUTSIDE that want to be inside and how much they are willing to pay.
UFK’s problem is that their stadium is beyond enormous and they have not adjusted their donation levels at all given the craptastic on-field performance and the economy. Go their season ticket site and see what all is available. There are some good seats left to be had, but they require absolutely ridiculous donations that nobody will pay given the soft demand.
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It’s a canary, but for multiple odors, as others here have said. Some of it is UT specific, starting with program frustration that you can pick up from any Vol fan. But I’ve said it before: my favorite sport is simply not as much fun as it used to be, and is getting even less fun, as if by design. I love my Dawgs, but I’m just not inclined to spend mucho dinero to watch a game vs an overmatched opponent that is dragged out with interminable TV time outs, official reviews and too many penalties. You can skip past the crap with DVR (or on ESPN 3) but not in the stadium.
Frankly, with some exceptions, I also don’t think the game day atmosphere is what it once was. Maybe the constant interruptions disrupt rhythm in the game and in the watching. Maybe it’s a larger contingent of “sit on my hands” fans waiting for the team to earn their cheers. Or pricing out of the market enthusiastic working class fans who don’t mind letting it rip (that was me, pre-college). Or the stricter alcohol control. Or maybe I’m just older. But loud and proud was once the rule (even in down years like ’79) and now seems more the exception.
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Every school has this issue.. I’ve never been so fired up as to be told to sit down during a game. I’ve just never understood that mentality. Those people don’t actually like the gameday atmosphere they should be the ones at home watching on TV.
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Don’t worry. The Tennessee – Alabama game will be a sell out one way or another, even if it means a few thousand extra Crimson shirts in the crowd.
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Somewhere along the line, the hassles overwhelmed the benefits. Is that me, or is that marketing? Don’t know.
When your 3-D TV is 10 times bigger than the space they give your butt at the stadium, that’s a problem. And cutting the size of the butt space by 20% when American butts have been moving in the opposite direction creates obvious issues as well.
Maybe we’ll adapt and get used to it, sort of like Europeans riding their metros or peeing on themselves in soccer stadiums. But it only takes one ride next to a drunken XXXXL to make you seriously reconsider your options from that point forward, in perpetuity.
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I don’t think that the bird is a canary I think it’s a goose that is laying golden eggs for the schools but as most of us are aware the effort to extract as many golden eggs out of this old bird as is possible is killing it.Shitty home games , fan unfriendly kick-off times and more games played in the heat of summer as opposed to the crisp fall afternoon and ultimately a school administration that is positively anti-fan fun and you end up running off your fan base,duh. Hell we have a 6th rank team and all our games are not sold out. These birds ain’t molting they’re dying. I blame Adams,the NCAA and Slive,in that order. Maybe someone more twisted than me can figure out how to blame Bobo.
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I haven’t been there in years, but Neyland gave you about 10 inches of butt-space in a region where most of the women over 30 need a “Wide-Load” sign plastered across their rears. Most uncomfortable ever.
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