Earlier this week reports surfaced about the athletic department reducing the allotment of student tickets for men's basketball games in Thompson-Boling Arena. Obviously, some students have not been happy to hear the news and others have wondered what that means for this season. The reality is that for students who go to games it will mean very little.

"We have gone back and studied attendance over the last four years and based on that historical data we felt like the allotment needed to be tweaked," Senior Associate Athletic Director John Currie said. "The original student allotment for games was six thousand tickets and our working number was five thousand tickets."

The fact is that student attendance never got close to those two numbers. Last season, the average student attendance was 2,131. The three largest turnouts were Memphis, South Carolina and Florida where there were over three thousand tickets used by students. In Coach Pearl's first season, there were three games where three thousand students or more were in attendance. In fact, student attendance went down from Pearl's first year to second year on the job.

As a result of Tennessee's study, the allotment is changing.

"We are not touching the lower level seats at all," Currie said. "The tweaks in the allotment are coming in the upper deck. Nothing is changing in the lower level."

Tennessee will hold three thousand tickets for six games a season and for two games a year they will hold back 3789 tickets for the students. For non-SEC games, the student allotment will be 1550 tickets, which is the lower level seats.

"We will sit down with student government in the summer and go over the schedule to determine the top eight games and set the allotment," Currie said.

Obviously, some non-conference games could be selected as one of the big games. For example, this coming season, the allotment for the Ohio State game will be more than 1550 tickets.

The other change that is coming is for games over Christmas break when only 500 student tickets will be available.

As a result of the changes, Tennessee will also have to change the way students go to games. Instead of just showing up and swiping a student ID, it is likely that there will have to be some kind of ticket pick-up system.

But the bottom line is if a student wants to watch a Tennessee basketball game, they will be able to do so. Tennessee's allotment of tickets for students will remain the largest of any school in the SEC and given the numbers the last couple of years, Tennessee will not run out of student tickets for games.