Is Knoxville 'America's College Sports City'? Maybe, but for reasons other than the size of Neyland Stadium

Tennessee athletics started a marketing push on Saturday, making the claim for Knoxville as "America's College Sports City".

The highlight video below fits pretty well. And after the athletics season UT just had, why not?

The video also was sent out to Tennessee's ticket emailing list in a marketing package that included some bullet points that may have missed the mark.

They include, per a UT Ticketmaster email:

• "The University of Tennessee is the ONLY school in the country with both a 100,000+ seat football stadium and a 20,000+ seat basketball arena."

• "For the 2022-23 athletic year, UT led the country in combined total attendance for the sports of football, men’s basketball & women’s basketball (1,167,226)."

• "Tennessee is the only school to have hosted ESPN College GameDay for football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball. In 2022-23, Tennessee Athletics became the first school in history to host ESPN College GameDay on campus four times in the same athletic year."

• "For the 2022 football season, the Knoxville television market ranked No. 2 in ESPN’s Primetime Market list. Knoxville also ranked as the No. 5 market for the complete men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament."

Attendance figures are nice. Hosting College GameDay is fun. TV ratings are meh. But the point is — Knoxville is the place where big things happen.

Those figures may matter to advertisers, but not nearly as much to fans. 2022-23 was too good for Tennessee athletics, beyond ESPN's Primetime Market tabulation and the size of Thompson-Boling Arena.

And a school wouldn't proclaim itself as America's College Sports City if its top programs were lousy.

How about some different bullet points?

• Tennessee football was ranked No. 1 in the CFP rankings for the first time ever and started 8-0 for the first time since 1998.

• Tennessee softball returned to the College World Series and won a game in the WCWS for the first time since 2013.

• Tennessee baseball returned to the College World Series for the second time in three seasons and won a game in Omaha for the first time since 2001.

• Both the Lady Vols and Tennessee men's basketball earned Sweet 16 berths in the same year for the first time since 2014.

• Tennessee is the only school to earn berths to a New Year's Six bowl, the Men's Sweet 16, the Women's Sweet 16, the Women's College World Series and Men's College World Series in the 2022-23 athletics season. No other school in Division I athletics did better than accomplishing three of those five feats.

Sure, the size of the stadiums are cool. But what the Vols' teams continue to do in those stadiums are the points to share.

Maybe the point of the bullet points about TV market size and Neyland Stadium's capacity number was to coax these points out of external media sources like Knox News. If so, well played.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Knoxville 'America's College Sports City'? Maybe, but not because of Neyland