Bunch of grown men bashing teenagers because they don't like their favorite sports team.
Here's the thing, the students who are Vols fans are going. The problem is, most the student body doesn't give a flying flip about football, let alone a losing football team like UT. They didn't come to UT for the sports or because they were fans, they came because it was their best option for college.
So, the goal is to convince around 5 thousand students who don't really care about football to fill out the rest of the student seating. The biggest issues as I see it are:
1) Paying for tickets. Now, I don't mean the 10$ price point, I mean the way the system works. Student tickets are bought like a week+ in advance. Moreover, you can't just go buy tickets. You have a couple day period to 'request' a ticket. Then you wait a couple of days at which point tickets are assigned to you and your group. You then have like a 2 day period to purchase said ticket or you lose it.
Now, you can buy another ticket by yourself if you want, but we're not talking about UT fans here, these are the people we're trying to drag along. They aren't going to attend a game by themselves. When I was attending, I cannot tell you how many times my friends would forget to buy their tickets on time, despite my reminders. It simply wasn't high on their list of things to worry about.
2) Time. Everyone talks about how it's just 4 hours, but it really isn't. Again, these are casual fans, if they are going to the game, it's for the total experience/social event. This means they are going to get up and tail gate, attend the game, eat after the game, and probably attend a post game party. A football game is an all day event. They aren't just going to the game and then going home, they don't care about the game. If a casual fan cannot devote a full day to the football day activities, they simply aren't going to go.
3) The atmosphere lately sucks (because we suck). The only real advantage to being at the game live (apart from supporting the team, which again, they don't care) is the atmosphere. However, most of our games are either blowout wins or blowout loses, and the crowd is never really into the game. This can only be fixed by winning.
There are obviously other reasons, many have been touched on elsewhere, but these are the bigs ones from my experience when I attended that haven't already been expressed.
