Tennessee basketball’s home court continues to be one of the toughest tickets in the sport.
The program announced Monday morning that it has sold out its full season-ticket allotment for the fourth straight year, locking in all 14,500 season tickets for the 2026-27 season. It marks the eighth consecutive full-capacity season in which more than 13,000 fans have bought season tickets, and the fifth year in a row the total has topped 14,000.
That news lands just over 24 hours before No. 8 Tennessee opens Rick Barnes’ 12th season on Rocky Top.
The Vols host Wofford on Tuesday night at Thompson-Boling Arena at Food City Center, with tipoff set for 6 p.m. ET on the SEC Network.
Tennessee is coming off its first action since a “secret” scrimmage against Davidson on Oct. 24. The Vols won that one after dropping preseason exhibitions to Xavier and Duke by a combined 189-134.
Junior guards Juke Harris and Terrence Hill Jr. were held out against Davidson because of minor injuries - Harris with a back issue and Hill with an ankle problem. Sixth-year guard Tyler Lundblade, who had been dealing with a back injury, did make his preseason debut.
Barnes said Oct. 29 that the team’s response to the exhibition losses had been positive.
"We've shown it to them, but sometimes you got to live it," Rick Barnes told the media on Oct. 29 when asked how his team has responded to the exhibition losses. "You got to go through it and live it.
And the way they responded has been good. I thought we were a much different looking team against Davidson, and we had the utmost respect for Davidson.
That was without two guys playing, but the fact is, it's all new to them.
"As coaches, we knew with 13 new players, and Troy (Henderson) missing pretty much the whole summer, and DeWayne (Brown) being the only person back - the great thing about it is we know that we've got the ability to be a lot better basketball team. Sometimes you need to get skinned up a little bit to get your attention.
You don't want that to happen, but you need to. That's why I love those exhibition games, because you can do so much with them to try to get some points across.
Because sometimes it takes getting burnt before you figure out we got to do something about it."
The Vols’ fan support has been a constant. Tennessee has finished in the top eight nationally in average attendance in each of the last nine seasons, cracked the top five for the past eight, and placed third in each of the last two years. Over the past three seasons, UT has averaged more than 19,000 fans per game.
Food City Center has also been a major draw around college basketball. Last season, it hosted five of the 12 highest-attended regular-season games in the country, along with the most-attended exhibition game.
It also had eight of the top 18 in 2024-25 and three of the top six in 2023-24. Over the past four seasons, Tennessee has produced 26 sellouts.
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