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Why Gator Bowl CEO expects a sellout for Indiana football vs. Tennessee

KNOXVILLE – In Rick Catlett’s first 27 years with the Gator Bowl, he entered bowl selection weekend with a good idea of which two teams would play in the Jacksonville, Florida, bowl game.

This year was different.

“I’ve never been in a position before where I just didn’t know going into the (conference) championship weekend,” Catlett, the Gator’s Bowl president and CEO, told the News Sentinel on Tuesday. “It was very stressful. Normally this thing really starts clicking pretty quickly once the Top 25 is announced, but this time it didn’t. This time, it was slower.”

Catlett’s stress turned to elation when he received official word that the Gator Bowl would feature Tennessee (7-5) and Indiana (8-4) in its 75th anniversary game on Jan. 2 (7 p.m. ET, ESPN).

“When the SEC called us and said, ‘OK, you got Tennessee,’ it’s been a long time since we’ve had a big ‘Yeah, let’s go!’ kind of moment,” Catlett said.

Early ticket sales have been booming, and Catlett expects a sellout at TIAA Bank Field, which has a listed capacity of 67,814.

Why will Tennessee vs. Indiana be good for attendance?

The Gator Bowl’s last sellout came on Jan. 1, 2010, in a game that featured Florida State against West Virginia in Seminoles coach Bobby Bowden’s final game.

Attendance has come in shy of 44,000 in each of the past three installments, with last year’s matchup of Texas A&M against North Carolina State producing a crowd of 38,206.

The Vols beat Iowa 45-28 on Jan. 2, 2015, in their most recent Gator Bowl appearance with 56,310 on hand. The Gator Bowl last topped 60,000 for a Jan. 1, 2014, game featuring Georgia and Nebraska.

Indiana is making its first appearance in a Florida bowl game, and each team is appearing in a bowl for the first time since the 2016 season.

“The problem with having 43 bowl games is that teams and their fans go to bowl games every year,” Catlett said. “And in this case, we had two teams that have some pent-up demand, have not gone to a bowl game in a couple of years. I think that would be a factor that plays into (attendance).”

The matchup was announced at 4:31 p.m. ET Sunday. Between that time and midnight, Catlett said, the Gator Bowl had its largest volume of one-day sales ever.

“It was unbelievable,” he said. “At one time, there were 3,000 people on our website at the same time. That’s pretty impressive.”

Gator Bowl edges Music City for Vols

Tennessee was on Catlett’s wish list entering the season, but he figured it wouldn’t come to fruition after the Vols’ 2-5 start. Then Tennessee closed the season on a five-game winning streak and re-entered the Gator Bowl picture.

“The more they won, the more we got interested in them,” Catlett said.

Tennessee became the bowl’s No. 1 choice, but the Music City Bowl in Nashville also coveted the Vols. Both are among the pool-of-six bowls, for which the SEC representative is assigned by the conference after consulting with bowl officials and individual teams for their preferences.

Erroneous reports Sunday declared that Tennessee would play Louisville in the Music City Bowl. If such a matchup were finalized, that might have sent Kentucky to Jacksonville to renew a once-annual rivalry with Indiana that has been dormant since 2005.

“We were in a very fortunate position this year that we had some really good options,” Catlett said, “and we’re very pleased to get our first options.”

When the SEC’s executive associate commissioner Mark Womack called Catlett on Sunday afternoon to tell him the Gator Bowl had landed the Vols, “I hadn’t been that excited in a long, long time,” Catlett said.

Blake Toppmeyer covers University of Tennessee football. Email him at blake.toppmeyer@knoxnews.com and follow him on Twitter @btoppmeyer. If you enjoy Blake’s coverage, consider a digital subscription that will allow you access to all of it.