Wrangling up more than 100,000 people can be quite the difficult challenge.
Unless, of course, the Tennessee Volunteers are playing inside Neyland Stadium. Then it’s a breeze.
Game week has arrived for Tennessee, which will open its 130th football season Saturday afternoon when the 20th-ranked Vols host Furman University before a sold out crowd of 101,915. It will be the 28th consecutive sellout inside the historic facility that opened in 1921, with the game itself accompanied by timeworn traditions of the Vol Navy on the neighboring Tennessee River, the pregame Vol Walk, and the players running through the “T” formed by the Pride of the Southland marching band moments before kickoff in Knoxville.
“It gives you chills,” Tennessee senior running back and returning 1,000-yard rusher DeSean Bishop said. “I remember my first time running out of the tunnel. I wasn’t even playing, but it was more than anything I could have imagined. It’s unlike anything you can imagine, and I am very grateful for our fans.
“I believe we have the best fan base in the world.”
The Vols opener has a 3:30 kickoff, and it will be shown on the ESPN+ streaming service.
Tennessee’s sellout streak has coincided with the rebirth the program has experienced under sixth-year coach Josh Heupel, who has a 45-20 record with the Vols, including a 38-14 mark the past four seasons. Before Heupel’s arrival, the Vols had struggled through an 11-year stretch under Derek Dooley, Butch Jones and Jeremy Pruitt that yielded a 66-69 record that was reduced to 55-69 as a result of NCAA sanctions that occurred during Pruitt’s tumultuous three-year stretch from 2018-20.
The Vols never had a sellout crowd under Pruitt, and their last two under Jones — the Alabama game of 2016 and the Georgia game of 2017 — were losses by the combined score of 90-10. Tennessee had only one sellout in Heupel’s debut season in 2021, but the current streak started with a 63-6 rout of Akron on Sept. 17, 2022.
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Tennessee’s ensuing home games this season against Kennesaw State (Sept. 19), Texas (Sept. 26), Auburn (Oct. 3) and Alabama (Oct. 17) have already been announced as sellouts as well.
“It doesn’t get old,” senior linebacker Jeremiah Telander said. “From the first time I ever ran through the ‘T’ throughout all last season, it hasn’t gotten old. It gets me every single time.”
Neyland Stadium will debut its new sound system Saturday, and there will be a new postgame traffic flow, with that information available on utsports.com.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com.
David Paschall has covered sports at the Chattanooga Times Free Press since 1999 and wrote for the Chattanooga Free Press in the nine years before that. David has mostly covered college athletics, with a focus on the University of Georgia from 2000 to 2019 and the University of Tennessee since 2020. He grew up in Chattanooga and is a graduate of the Baylor School and Auburn University. David has received multiple writing awards and has served as a Heisman Trophy voter since 2003. He has also worked in radio in Chattanooga and has been on the SEC Network’s “Classic Rewind” series since 2014. David and his wife, Kelly, have three children — Conner, Emily and Spencer.