Tom Brady has already had one dramatic effect on the Buccaneers and he hasn't even signed his deal yet – CBS Sports, Cbssports.com

Tom Brady hasn’t even officially signed a contract with the Buccaneers yet, but he’s already causing a ticket frenzy in Tampa Bay. Getting a ticket to a Buccaneers game used to be one of the easiest things to do in sports, but now that Brady is heading to Tampa, the team might have to do something that it never envisioned: Start a waiting list for season tickets. 

News of Brady’s decision to head to Tampa broke around 6: 40 p.m. ET on Tuesday, and not coincidentally, that also happens to be when Buccaneers fans almost broke Ticketmaster’s official website looking for season tickets. Less than 35 minutes after the announcement, Ticketmaster had a waiting list of 972 people looking for season tickets. 

The people who got to Ticketmaster’s website the fastest should consider themselves lucky, because the waiting list only got worse from there. 

By 7: 55 p.m. ET, the waiting list had crossed 4,000 people …

… and by 8: 51 p.m. ET, the queue was up over 6,500. 

Basically, Bucs tickets might be the only thing in this country right now more valuable than toiler paper. Buccaneers season tickets range in price from roughly $400 to $3,800. 

At rate things are going, Brady’s deal (reportedly $30 million per year) is going to pay for itself with ticket sales alone. 

The Buccaneers are owned by the Glazer family, and you have to think their mouths are already watering over the increased ticket sales that will be coming their way. Over the past 10 years, the Buccaneers have had one of the worst attendance marks in the NFL. In 2019 alone, Tampa ranked 29th overall in total attendance (415,189), 30th overall in average attendance (51,898 fans per game), while also having the second-worst home attendance percentage in the league. On average, Raymond James Stadium was only 79.1% full for Bucs home games in 2019, which ranked only ahead of the Bengals, who played in a stadium that was 72% full on average. The Redskins, Buccaneers and Bengals were the only three teams under 80%. 

If the Buccaneers sell out every game, their home attendance will increase by roughly 120,000, which means there will be 120,000 more people at the stadium buying, food, drinks and team merchandise, which will mean a lot of extra income for the Glazers. Since Brady hasn’t signed his contract yet, he may want to think about asking for a cut of that.