Looking for tickets to Tennessee's game against Ole Miss? They're available, if you're prepared to pay
Minimum ticket price for sold-out SEC game is nearly $150
Tennessee sold the last of its available tickets to Saturday’s game against Ole Miss on Monday, less than 12 hours after there were approximately 1,700 tickets remaining through the university’s ticket office.
That means 102,455 will be on hand to see the Vols “welcome” Lane Kiffin back to Knoxville, and the battle against the 13th-ranked Rebels will be Tennessee’s first sell-out since a 41-0 loss to Georgia in September 2017.
Demand for tickets to Saturday’s game has increased substantially since Tennessee’s offense has found a rhythm in back-to-back SEC games against Missouri and South Carolina. This has quickly become the most-sought-after ticket to a Vols home game in more than six years. To find the last time tickets were selling for more, you have to go back to 2015, when UT hosted Oklahoma in Year 2 of the Butch Jones era.
Adding to the hype, Tennessee athletics director Danny White announced Monday that Saturday’s game would be a “Checker Neyland” effort, with fans replicating the Vols’ famed checkboard end zone effect throughout the stadium.
If you’re wanting to be there for Saturday’s game, you aren’t out of options. You’re just going to have to be willing to fork out a little more money than you ordinarily would.
As of midnight Wednesday night, there were 459 tickets available through Vividseats, the reseller that is officially endorsed by the University of Tennessee. Other tickets are available through other scalper sites, and on online marketplaces like Craigslist, though they’re often duplicated from the Vividseats listings.
The minimum cost of a ticket, as of Wednesday night on Vividseats, was $149 each. That was for four tickets in Row 18 of Section II in the south upper end zone, tickets that have a face value of $45 each. The cheapest lower level ticket was $159 for a single seat in Row 29 of Section Z11 in the north end zone, and the cheapest sideline ticket was $185 for a single ticket in Row 26 of Section V on the Tennessee sideline.
So if you’re a gambler, do you want to go ahead and cash in now, or hold out and see if tickets come down before kickoff?
If you’re looking for a single, or a maximum of two tickets together, tickets will almost certainly come down before kickoff. The number of available tickets is increasing, not decreasing, and no one wants to be stuck holding a fistful of tickets because they priced them too high.
But context is important when considering how many tickets are available and attempting to predict which direction prices will go in the final days before the game.
With fewer than 500 tickets available on Vividseats (out of 102,455 seats), there aren’t exactly a plethora of tickets on the market. As of Tuesday morning, there were fewer than 250 tickets available, so that number has gone up — almost doubled in fact.
But the price of tickets isn’t going down. Also as of Tuesday morning, there were a handful of tickets on the market for less than $100. While some of the increased ticket availability is undoubtedly due to folks who jumped online and purchased some of the last few tickets from AllVols.com with strict intentions of reselling them for profit, the increased cost of the available tickets doesn’t match the increased supply of the tickets, which indicates that the increased availability isn’t due to a surplus of tickets, but people who were holding tickets and have decided to put them up for sale since they’ve increased in value due to the game being a sell-out. (That’s also evidenced in the fact that there were tickets available in almost every section of the stadium as of Wednesday night, while less than 48 hours earlier there were only tickets available in a smattering of sections.)
In other words, many of the sellers who have tickets to offer probably aren’t going to slash the price of their unsold tickets as kickoff nears. Rather, they’re enterprising UT fans who had tickets because they had intended to go to the game, and if they can’t make the profit they want from their tickets, they’ll simply go to the game.
All of that means we aren’t likely to see a big drop in ticket prices as gametime nears.
That’s especially true when you consider that there are a few folks shelling out some serious bucks for tickets. Late Monday, there were 24 tickets being offered together in Section FF for $381 each. By Tuesday, that number had dropped to 17. Someone — or some people — apparently paid nearly $400 each for upper level tickets to see the Vols take on the Rebels. That ranks up there with what late-selling tickets were going for to the Tennessee-Oklahoma game in 2015.
If you’re willing to gamble, wait and try your hand with the scalpers on the street on Saturday — though seasoned street-buyers know that buying tickets in person outside the stadium is becoming an increased gamble, indeed.
If you’re not willing to wait, the best deal currently available for tickets is for up to three together in Row 21 of Section ZZ12 — chairbacks in the upper north endzone. You can grab them on StubHub for $111 each, plus fees.