Tennessee football isn’t just hot, it’s scalding hot. And as the saying goes, you strike while the iron is hot.
Tennessee announced Tuesday that it is increasing football season ticket prices in 2025, including a 10 percent hike specifically billed as a “talent fee” to increase revenue available for the athletic department to distribute to players. I think it’s a very wise move by athletic director Danny White, not least because the Vols are 3-0 and ranked No. 6 in the AP poll after decimating their first three opponents by a combined score of 191-13.
Tennessee has arguably the most rabid fan base in college sports, a community that endured a soul-sucking decade-plus of futility before White hired coach Josh Heupel. In his first three seasons, Heupel has pulled the Vols out of the ditch and helped make them one of the nation’s hottest teams.
The Vols made a big, bold bet in the early stages of the new landscape for player compensation when five-star quarterback recruit Nico Iamaleava signed a contract worth approximately $8 million with Spyre Sports, a collective that works with Tennessee athletes, as first reported by The Athletic in March 2022.
As we’ve learned time and time and time again, there is no such thing as a sure thing in football recruiting, especially when it comes to five-star quarterbacks. But Spyre was all-in on Iamaleava, and through the first four starts of his career, including a Citrus Bowl win against Iowa to cap the 2023 season, the 6-6, 215-pound former volleyball star is looking really, really good.
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At the time when the deal with Iamaleava was signed, Heupel had just led Tennessee to a 7-6 season in his first year in Knoxville after arriving from UCF. The Vols’ football brand didn’t have close to the power of what Georgia or Alabama or even Ole Miss had built. Even Kentucky had won 10 games that year. Tennessee hadn’t had a double-digit-win season in 15 years and had not finished in the top 10 in 22 years.
But in 2022, the Vols unleashed Heupel’s wide-open, fast-paced version of the offense Art Briles popularized at Baylor to put SEC defenses on their heels, going 11-2 and finishing No. 6 in the country behind transfer quarterback Hendon Hooker. Since then, Tennessee has been sizzling.
Now Tennessee has made another big move to get the program to an even higher level, pushing its legion of fans to put their money where their mouths are. This one doesn’t seem nearly as risky.
“We have a lot of demand,” Tennessee athletic director Danny White told The Athletic on Tuesday. “People are excited about the resurgence that Josh has been able to lead here going into Year 4, but we also have a new reality in this new world order of college sports. Revenue sharing is gonna be a big part of it. That has created some financial realities, and after talking about it a lot, we said, let’s just be transparent with our fans — tell them exactly what it is, and that’s where we came up with the concept of a talent fee.”
Tradition only goes so far. Now more than ever, it isn’t just lip service to say that your program’s level of fan support matters.
Over the past month, The Athletic has been surveying coaches about the best jobs in college football. One of the Big Ten coaches we spoke to responded this way when asked to rank the top five head coaching jobs in the country:
- $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
- $$$$$$$$$$$$$$
- $$$$$$$$$$$$
- $$$$$$$$$$
- $$$$$$$$$
It’s a more succinct way to explain a point most of the other coaches have been making about how much the landscape has changed just in the past few years. Asking fans to help foot the bill for rising player compensation limits probably isn’t a lever most college football programs can pull, but Tennessee, like a handful of SEC and Big Ten programs, isn’t like everybody else. Last season, the Vols led the SEC in total home attendance. They’ve had 15 consecutive sellouts of Neyland Stadium, which seats almost 102,000 fans, and have sold out its 70,500 season tickets for back-to-back seasons, with a waiting list of almost 15,000 fans with interest in season tickets, according to White.
The economic system of college sports has been in a state of flux for years, but the changes have gotten even more dramatic due to loosened restrictions on name-image-likeness compensation, increased use of the transfer portal and conference realignment. With revenue sharing for college athletes on the horizon once the settlement in the House v. NCAA lawsuit is finalized, another big shake-up is expected. Top schools expect to be permitted to spend upwards of $20 to $30 million on their athletes.
White estimates with the talent fee and the initial 4.5 percent average price increase per seat across the stadium, the changes should bring in about around $10 million if Tennessee sells out its season tickets again, which he expects to be the case. “It’s a good start,” he said. “It’s about one-third of the math problem, but it’s a good start.”
The Vols were among the first programs to take aggressive steps forward in the new reality of increased NIL freedoms. White told The Athletic on Tuesday that he doesn’t consider it important to separate the revenue sharing and NIL payment markets when it comes to the impact of rising ticket prices.
“I don’t really make that distinction,” White said. “I really categorize all of it as resources going to the student-athletes, whatever label you want to put on it. If the settlement goes through, that is going to look like an agreed-upon revenue share. I don’t see any iteration where we’re not providing resources to them, if you want to call it NIL, you wanna call it revenue share, the financial reality stays the same.”
To this point, Tennessee relied heavily on four or five big donors to help fund its NIL program. “That’s not sustainable,” said a program source. “They’ve really carried the freight. This takes the burden off of them.”
“We’ve heard from all over the country the donor fatigue associated with NIL,” White said. “We need better organization around the whole thing. This is a way for our fan base to help with a portion of it, certainly not all of it. It’s not just NIL and (revenue) share, it’s also the scholarship limits that are also being discussed as part of this settlement. If scholarship limits go away, there’s significant expense with that as well if we want to compete for national championships in every sport that we have, which we’re committed to doing at Tennessee.”
The new ticket model gives Vols fans a direct line into helping their team beat Alabama and Georgia not only on the field but in recruiting, where the battle really begins. White has taken a strategy of transparency with the Vols faithful to let them know where their money will be going. I suspect you’ll see more big football programs following suit.
(Photo: Brandon Sumrall / Getty Images)
