Hamilton to charge students for tickets; no comment from boosters

For all the good AD Mike Hamilton has done for the University of Tennessee athletics programs over the past few years, the news out of Knoxville today has got to be the most despicable. 

UT has long been lauded as the place where the greatest football fans in the world converge on Saturdays in the fall.  Now, for some reason, the Athletics Department wants to make it more difficult for students to get into the game?

It started 4 years back with the increased security (read: full body searches) at the student gates to keep out the criminals who liked to provide their own refreshments during the game.  It continued last year when UT banned smoking anywhere inside the stadium’s fences (yes, the outdoor stadium).  And now we’re gouging students to get into the game?

Starting this fall, UT students will be asked to pay for tickets to the football games.

UT students have been able to get into all regular-season sport contests, including football games, since the inception of the school.  Now they will be asked to pay a $90 football season ticket fee (on top of the mandatory $250 student activities fee assessed by the school), or $15 per game.

Come on, Mike.  You need that money that bad?

“The reason we didn’t (raise fees), frankly, is that a student fee affects every student on campus,” Hamilton said. “By actually charging for the football tickets, it’s a user-specific amount. Somebody can choose whether to purchase tickets or not. We hope that students will come and be a part of it and that they’ll buy all the tickets they have available to them.”

Hamilton also never bothered to take the input of those directly affected… the students.  An understandably perturbed student body president, John Rader, called it “lunacy.”

So maybe this fall, after UT cashes that mandatory check, and then asks for ninety more dollars to see the Orange and White play football, the students will open their wallets once more, for the tradition, pride and spectacle of it all.

Or maybe they won’t.  And if they don’t, I, for one, won’t blame them one bit.

You really dropped the ball this time, Mr. Hamilton.  You should be ashamed.