Three days before the UTEP football season opener, there are still plenty of seats left in the Sun Bowl for the Miners and Stephen F. Austin.

UTEP/Ticketmaster.
UTEP/Ticketmaster.
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As you can see by the individual ticket map on UTEPMiners.com, the west side of the stadium is not available for individual ticket purchases. What is also interesting is that even though UTEP is partnering with Ticketmaster, you can only buy Miners tickets online by visiting UTEP's website. If you search ticketmaster.com, it shows no events for UTEP Football. As of the writing of this story, the available tickets for purchase by highlighted blue section in the map are as follows:
Section 11: 80         Section 21: 379
Section 12: 37         Section 22: 285
Section 13: 69         Section 23: 383
Section 14: 137       Section 24: 358
Section 15: 114       Section 25: 396
Section 16: 32         Section 26: 141

If you add up all 12 sections in the end zone and east side of the stadium, you get a total of 2,411 tickets remaining. UTEP Director of Athletics Jim Senter joined us on SportsTalk yesterday and said that about half of the Sun Bowl remained for Saturday night's home opener. The new capacity for the 2020 season is 8,594. However, there still are over a thousand unsold seats on the west side of the stadium that UTEP has put aside for season ticket sales. When you add those to sections 11-16 and 21-26, the total number of available seats is over 4,000.

The UTEP marching band will not be allowed on the field, but they are planning to spread out over two sections of the stadium. I would expect the band to occupy sections 18 and 19 at the Sun Bowl, since that would still allow sections 17 and 20 to remain empty for UTEP's social distancing policy.

UTEP also announced that they moved away from paper tickets and instead all tickets and parking passes will be available using a mobile delivery service that can be scanned on a smartphone. Despite the fact that most pro sports teams are already doing this, some older Miners fans are upset that the university did away with paper tickets for 2020. Since many of these fans are not used to using their smartphones for ticket entry into sporting events, they have struggled with the new mobile delivery system. However, UTEP was smart to avoid printing season tickets, since originally scheduled home games against Texas Tech and NMSU were both canceled. Rather than having to print replacement tickets for the new games against SFA and Abilene Christian (originally the same date as the Texas road game), mobile ticketing saves UTEP money and it also is more convenient during the COVID pandemic.

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