College football's toxic atmosphere
Is it beer sales or something else that's causing us to lose our minds?
I did something at Neyland Stadium Saturday night that I’ve never done at a football game before.
No, I didn’t chuck an empty water bottle (or even a golf ball) at the field. Instead, I turned to a fan behind me and told him to tone down the language.
I shook my head for most of the pregame and the first half. But after 500 or so F-bombs (I’m not sure that’s even an exaggeration), along with all the other vulgar language he dropped, I’d had enough.
The dude was sitting directly behind my son and his girlfriend, and as he was letting a string of vulgarities fly at Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin — as if Kiffin could hear him — I told him he needed to tone it down. He didn’t even skip a beat, but to his wife’s credit, she reached over their young son who was sitting between them and said something to him, and he calmed down for most of the rest of the game. We even chatted cordially about the game late in the fourth quarter.
It wasn’t just him, of course. There was a man sitting directly behind him who was just as vulgar as he was, and plenty of others around about who were just as obscene.
In front of us was an elderly black gentleman who proudly informed everyone around him that he was there to watch his granddaughter play in the Pride of the Southland Marching Band. But as soon as the band had finished its halftime show and played the alma mater, he left.
I couldn’t blame him. The constant stream of vulgarities coming from all sides of us sucked the enjoyment out of the game.
All of the attention surrounding fan behavior at Saturday’s Tennessee-Ole Miss game is centered on the UT students — and others — who hurled Dasani bottles and other objects onto the field for more than 15 minutes after officials failed to overturn a questionable spot that resulted in a turnover on downs with 54 seconds remaining.
Maybe that’s justifiable. But, to me, the behavior of students is just part of a bigger problem, and that’s the general toxic nature of college football atmospheres in general.
I’m not one of those fans who thinks college football games should be sterile environments. If you’re going to the stadium to sit on your hands, and you expect everyone around you to also sit on their hands, you should probably stay at home and watch the game on a 70-inch HDTV. It’s a lot cheaper and a lot more comfortable.
I enjoy going to games for the pageantry that surrounds college football, and a big part of the pageantry is the atmosphere inside the stadium. I sing Rocky Top as loudly as anyone (I don’t woo, for the record), I sing the Star Spangled Banner, I sing the alma mater, I yell at the refs, I high-five everyone around me after big plays, and I’ve even hugged complete strangers a time or two after an exhilarating win.
I spent the entire Tennessee-Ole Miss game on my feet, except for the media time outs, even though I was closer to the top of the stadium than to the field.
No, I don’t expect a sterile environment. I expect the crowd to be loud, boisterous, and just a little unruly. It’s what creates the home field advantage, and the atmosphere that we all know and love.
But over the past couple of years, I’ve seen a big change at Neyland Stadium.
Maybe I’m just seated in the wrong parts of the stadium. I haven’t had season tickets in a decade; the fact that it costs a small fortune to go to games makes me pick and choose a few each year to attend rather than trying to be at every one. Since I refuse to pay scalpers’ prices for lower level seats, I typically sit in the upper level. And that seems to be where the most poorly-behaved fans are seated. My friends who are regulars in the lower bowl at Neyland Stadium tell me they haven’t seen the same things I’m seeing.
But what I’m seeing is this: A constant stream of vulgarities from every direction. Belligerent behavior that sometimes includes fan-on-fan. It’s complete lunacy.
If it were just me, it wouldn’t bother me nearly as much. I don’t claim to have the cleanest mouth in the world. But my kids are usually with me, and pardon me for thinking that there are several lines you shouldn’t cross when minors are present. They’re teenagers; it’s not like they don’t hear the same stuff at school, and on TV, but it’s just a little uncalled for when it’s unrelenting behavior throughout the course of an entire game.
If you want to know the truth, the throwing of objects onto the field near the end of Saturday’s game wasn’t the worst behavior exhibited by Tennessee fans. It was primarily a few dozen students throwing stuff onto the field, which doesn’t excuse the behavior, but at midnight on a Saturday night, I’m not sure we should expect much better from college-aged students. However, the repeated chants of “F- You Kiffin” and other sexually-oriented chants at Kiffin were coming from the middle-aged adults as well as the students. The crude gestures were coming from adults as well as students. We were inside Neyland Stadium for six hours Saturday night, and it was six hours of constant cussing, vulgarity and obnoxiousness.
At one point, my wife and I both looked at one another and said, “This isn’t fun anymore.”
Call me a boomer or a Karen if you like, but I believe college football environments are becoming increasingly toxic, and I blame it primarily on the alcohol that’s being consumed at the venues.
Maybe there’s no real correlation between the start of beer sales at Neyland Stadium and the decline of fan behavior, but it’s hard for me to wrap my mind around a coincidence of that size.
Obviously there has always been an abundance of drunk fans in attendance at any college football game. Beer and college football go together like hand and glove for a lot of people, and they spend all day getting soused before entering the stadium. Before beer sales began, there were always plenty of people who bootlegged liquor into the stadium, and it wasn’t uncommon for obnoxious drunk fans to be ejected from the game.
But now the obnoxiousness seems to have increased by several fold. And while it’s certainly not everyone who drinks, the vast majority of the obnoxious fans who are screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs usually have a can of beer in their hand. (That’s not to mention the cups of beer that come raining down from higher up in the bleachers after especially big plays, like the one that drenched the young ladies sitting to my left after Tennessee’s late-game interception Saturday night. And, call me crazy, but I’d rather have a cup of Coke dumped on me than a cup of beer. It just smells better.)
My son and daughter went to their first college football game when they were four, and they’ve been attending games regularly since then. My youngest son is now four, and there’s no way I’d consider taking him to a football game at this age. It’s just not a family-friendly atmosphere any longer, and that’s really unfortunate.
Some would be clear to point out that a night game against a hated foe like Kiffin is never going to be a family-friendly atmosphere. Former Tennessee player Gerald Riggs tweeted a warning against taking children to Saturday’s game, as if there’s ever a justifiable reason for a football game not being family-friendly.
The problem is that I experienced the same type of behavior at the Pittsburgh game several weeks earlier, and it was a noon start. It was constant cussing, constant vulgarities, constant belligerence from all around us.
To be clear, it’s not everyone. In fact, much like those throwing the trash onto the field Saturday night, it’s a very, very small minority of the whole. The vast majority of fans in attendance are polite, well-mannered, and easy to get along with. Unfortunately, a few fans can ruin it for everyone, and the “few” seem to be increasing in number.
Nor is it just a Tennessee problem. The reason I dreaded seeing beer sales begin at Neyland Stadium in 2019 is because I had witnessed far more of this type of belligerent behavior in venues where beer is sold than in stadiums where it wasn’t sold. This is a problem that extends well beyond Tennessee and Tennessee fans.
Beer sales are here to stay at college venues. They make way too much money for the universities, so there’s no putting that cat back into the bag. But my opinion is that it has changed the experience for the worse. It’s helped to create a toxic atmosphere that is no longer a fun family experience.
As for me, as much as I enjoy the pageantry of a college football Saturday, I’m going to have to think long and hard before I go back any time soon.
I couldn't agree with you more. I was also there last night with my 3 children and my youngest daughters first neyland experience. I've been to day and night games all the way back to the mid 80's and last night was the worst of them all. I blame it also on the beer sales. Having to guard your children from wobbly, disrespect adults 40+years old is not what I was imagining when I purchased the tickets. May be the last for me, for a while anyway. Maybe my tolerances are just shorter for idiots who knows?