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Ohio State will have home-field advantage on its side when it hosts Tennessee for their College Football Playoff showdown on Saturday. However, it sounds like Vols fans will be very well-represented in Columbus based on a couple of pretty telling indicators.
2024 marks the first year the College Football Playoff will feature 12 schools vying for a national championship, and it’s also the first time some of those postseason games won’t be held at a neutral site.
The sixth-seeded Ohio State Buckeyes are one of the four teams that earned the right to welcome the opposing squad into enemy territory, and they’re obviously hoping they’ll fare better against the #7 Tennessee Volunteers than they did against the last team they faced off against at Ohio Stadium— a venue that ended up at the center of a proposed flag-planting ban thanks to what transpired after that contest.
Tennessee only received an allotment of 3,500 tickets for the game at a venue that can hold close to 103,000 spectators, so it seemed safe to assume members of THE Ohio State faithful would comprise the overwhelming majority of the fans in the stands. However, that may not end up being the case.
Last week, Ohio State’s athletic director urged Buckeyes fans with tickets to the game to resist the urge to flip them on the secondary market to prevent Vols Nation from invading The Shoe.
There’s no way to know how many people ended up ignoring that plea, but as Awful Announcing‘s Ben Koo notes, 42% of the tickets that have been sold on SeatGeek have been purchased by people residing in Tennessee.
Updates on the botched OSU playoff ticket sale…
1- Per @SeatGeek “42% of tickets resold on the platform have gone to Tennessee residents”
2- Professional resellers holding a huge amount of tickets. Prices quickly dropping (get in price now under $200) pic.twitter.com/PG1bxWpJz5
— Ben Koo (@bkoo) December 16, 2024
That statistic tracks with the prediction Ohio State president Ted Carter shared at a business leadership forum in Texas last week, as University of Tennessee president Randy Boyd said his fellow admin thinks Vols fans could end up comprising 30% of the stadium when things get underway on Saturday.
The Buckeyes are currently listed as 7.5-point favorites and will still end up playing in front of a crowd that’s mostly on their side, but all signs point to Tennessee fans making more of an impact than initially anticipated.