ATHENS – Don’t have a ticket to Saturday’s Georgia-Tennessee but still want to go?
Prepare to pay through the nose, as the saying goes.
The get-in price on the eve of the biggest game ever played in 93-year-old Sanford Stadium is $568, according to VividSeats.com. Want a couple on the 50-yard line? Those could run you as much as $3,200, the third-party ticket distributor reports.
Prices to attend Saturday’s 3:30 p.m. game have increased 156% over the course of the season. Tennessee was picked to finish third in the SEC East – behind Georgia and Kentucky – at SEC Media Days in Atlanta this summer. Instead, the Volunteers (8-0, 4-0 SEC) arrive at Sanford Stadium undefeated and ranked No. 1 in the first College Football Playoff rankings released earlier this week. Georgia (8-0, 5-0) was third in that ranking, but remains No. 1 in both the Associated Press and USA Today coaches’ polls.
The Bulldogs have won five games in a row over Tennessee and remain a 8.5-point favorite to win Saturday, according to VegasInsideder.com.
Some other fun facts:
- The ticket prices for Saturday are more than double what they were when Georgia played at Neyland Stadium last year. The Bulldogs won that game 41-17.
- The average price of $568 is more than any NFL game being played this weekend.
- The “hottest ticket” of week for Vivid Seats is a pair to Georgia-Tennessee for $398 each; Clemson at Notre Dame for $293 is next on the list, followed by Alabama at LSU for $277.
- The previous “hottest ticket” for a Georgia-Tennessee game was $220 to attend limited-capacity game of 2020 at Sanford Stadium.
- The greatest demand in recent history for a ticket to a Georgia home game was $540 to attend the 2019 Notre Dame contest. The Bulldogs expanded capacity by 500 seats to 93,246 for that contest.
The incredible demand has created quite a free-market competition among fans of the respective teams on the secondary-ticket market. Tennessee fans are encouraging each other to spend whatever it takes to procure tickets from Georgia season-ticket holders. Likewise, the conversation among the Bulldogs on social media and in fan-site chatrooms is to not sell their tickets no matter how great the profit they could make.
Georgia fans were able to take over Notre Dame Stadium on Sept. 21, 2017, when they spared no expense to buy up every available ticket on the secondary market. The Bulldogs prevailed against the Fighting 20-19 in South Bend before a crowd estimated to be between 66-75% Georgia fans, based on the red in the stands.
Based on rankings alone, Georgia-Tennessee is the biggest game contested in Sanford Stadium. The game is slated for national broadcast by CBS as its SEC game of the week. Both ESPN’s “ College GameDay” and “SEC Nation” will broadcasting their Saturday pregame shows from campus. “SEC Nation” will be set up on the lawn of the Richard Russell Special Collections Library on North Campus, while “GameDay” will be set up on the Myers Quad on South Campus.
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