With the season just a couple of weeks away, we’re starting to get news about changes to the game day experience. We haven’t heard anything new about tailgating, parking, or traffic flow, and we’re not expecting significant changes in those areas. We’ll pass along anything that comes up.

One thing that is changing is how you enter the stadium – no more tearing of ticket stubs.

All reserved seat tickets are bar-coded and will be scanned for entry at all gates. UGA Student tickets will continue to be loaded onto their UGA ID Card and only accepted at Gates 1, 3 and 4A.

Few transitions are seamless, so fans are urged to get to the South Carolina game a little early to avoid a crush at the gates.

Going to scanning will allow fans to transfer tickets online (through official UGA partner StubHub). While UGA hasn’t announced details of that process yet, StubHub does this with other teams, and we expect that things will be similar for Georgia. Look for an e-mail from UGA soon with specifics.

There is one obvious issue with the StubHub system: there will still be the original tickets out there. These aren’t counterfeit tickets – these are once-valid tickets that have been transfered online and inactivated. StubHub’s system works like this: “The barcodes on the tickets you currently have will be invalidated and tickets with a new bar code will be issued to the buyer.” It’s easy to imagine a number of inactivated tickets floating around the secondary market, especially for bigger games. There needs to be some way outside of the StubHub system – apart from at the gate – to verify whether a ticket is valid.