Sports

Florida Students Slept In Tents To Watch National Championship Game Played 1,000 Miles Away

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Florida Students Camp Tent Bar National Championship The Swamp
© Alan Festo/The Gainesville Sun / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Florida will play Houston in the college basketball national championship on Monday night. Students are currently camping out in Gainesville even though the game is going to be played in San Antonio.

They want to be sure to lock down a prime seat at the rowdiest bar in the city.

The 2024-25 college basketball season will come to an end at the Alamodome in Texas. Only 700 student tickets are available for each participating school so attendance is fairly limited and traveling to the game presents a lot of logistical challenges for 18/21-year-olds. Especially for the Gators.

The University of Florida, which enrolls approximately 62,000 students, is located 1,052 miles from San Antonio. It is a 15-hour drive. Most students cannot afford a plane ticket. Housing presents another issue.

As a result, the vast majority of students are going to stay local and watch the game amongst their peers. No game day location is more popular than The Swamp Restaurant. This was the scene after the Gators won in the Final Four on Saturday:

Tipoff is scheduled for 8:50 p.m. on Monday night. The Swamp will open its doors more than six hours prior at 2:00 p.m. A full party must be present to be seated. Seats are first come, first serve, so the people who arrive right at opening are located closest to the screens. Those who arrive later are pushed further to the back.

With that in mind, a large number of students are not taking any chances so they camped out overnight. Tents started popping up around 5:00 p.m. ET on Sunday— more than 24 hours before the game.

The line of makeshift campsites stretched pretty far down the street!

Students moved all of their belongings for what was sure to be a rowdy night.

They even brought their Xboxes to help pass the time!

This kind of camp out is not uncommon in college basketball. Some schools, like Duke, have students sleep in tents for more than a week to get a ticket to big rivalry games. This is not that.

Students at Florida are doing this to get a seat at a bar to watch a game being played four states over. That is a testament to the environment at The Swamp, as well as the rowdiness in Gainesville. Gators fans are ready to go. They are ready for tipoff.