‘It was a madhouse’: Big Orange Tix to improve student ticketing following historically high demands

chance to obtain tickets.

University of Tennessee students are thrilled to see Vol sports teams performing well, but their excitement has often been met with the frustration of not being able to secure tickets to games.

For football and basketball in particular, the demand for tickets has surged alongside the success of teams. This increase in demand has made it difficult for students to get their hands on tickets to cheer on the Vols.

“During football season it was a madhouse,” senior business analytics major Delilah Davis said. “Everyone I knew had 20 alarms set to try and be the first ones on the Big Orange Tix site when tickets opened up.”

Big Orange Tix is an online portal for students to obtain discounted tickets online. Football tickets open for students to request approximately a week before a particular sporting event.

The most common misconception about the football ticketing process is that students need to be the first to request tickets in order to secure them. When an overload of students spam the website at once, it makes it a lot harder for students to easily enter the system.

“I remember waiting on the website for the clock to turn from 8:59 a.m. to 9 a.m.,” Davis said. “Once the request opened the site immediately crashed and everyone was freaking out thinking they weren’t going to get tickets. It was now becoming normal for the site to run slow, glitch or crash due to high traffic.”

The ticketing office urges students to read the ticketing information on their website to avoid confusion.

“There’s a request period and we even state on our website that the time you request does not impact your chances of getting selected,” a spokesperson for Big Orange Tix said.

In actuality, the ticket distribution system is based on a few methods that impact a student’s ability to receive tickets.

Unless tickets are “On Demand,” meaning you buy them on the spot, there is no reason to request a ticket right when the portal opens. As long as the ticket is requested within the two-day window, students have just as good a

The loyalty points system is one of the biggest deciding factors in determining which students are selected to receive tickets. These points are usually earned by attending previous home football games. Points will not be gained from student sellout games, away games or any other UT sporting event.

Although not always the case, upperclassmen will tend to have priority over ticket allocation when there are games of high demand due to them generally having more loyalty points. While this system is currently in place, Big Orange Tix continues to strive towards the fairness of the ticket system.

“We are taking a look at improvements over the off season to see of ways that maybe we can look at students having other opportunities to earn loyalty points,” a spokesperson for Big Orange Tix said. “So it is something we’re exploring, but nothing is concrete at this time.”

Please remember that the request period and loyalty system mostly pertains to home football games. Basketball games and tournament games are typically “On Demand,” meaning they are first come, first serve.

With an influx of enrollment for the upcoming school year, UT is searching for new ways to improve the ticketing system so all students have a fair chance to cheer on the Vols.