During the SEC spring meetings today in Destin, FL, Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne took to the stand to discuss some topics surrounding the university. The discussion ranged from paying players to scheduling teams, but the most interesting comments came up when discussing attendance.
Over the past couple of seasons, Alabama has developed a bit of an issue when it comes to attendance. It isn’t, in fact, getting people to get into the stadium, but rather keeping them there for the entirety of the game. It came up in national conversations last year after Tim Tebow called out the students for not showing up to an 11 a.m. game against Louisianna-Lafayette. This caused the athletic administration to make a move to try and keep students and other fans to stay for the entirety of the game. Thus Dixie Land Delight was brought back.
Despite the famous tradition making its return during the fourth quarter of each game, there are still concerns for the 2019-20 season.
“I think all of us are paying attention to attendance in every matter. We’re very fortunate at Alabama that we’re still selling our tickets. However we’re still cognizant of people staying the entire game,” said Byrne. “For a lot of us my age an older, you just went to the ball game, you stayed the entire time. And now there’s a mentality of getting there at the last second, leaving and beating the crowd, the pressures of television, all those things.”
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A lot of the points made here are extremely valid. As a student currently attending the university, there has been a bit of a beat the traffic mentality whenever the team runs out to a bit of a lead. It also doesn’t help when small out of conference schools come to town and the kickoff time is early in the morning. I can really only speak for students here by saying that some of them see it as a chore which is a real shame. With the wildfire of success that has engulfed the university since Nick Saban has arrived, it is easy to forget the tough times the school went through before.
But later on in the conference, Byrne did comment on how the school is looking to improve the wifi in the stadium. Which is where things got odd.
“The Wifi is still a bit of a bugaboo and is very very very expensive.”
Now I am no expert on how expensive routers can be. But what I do know is that the football team brings in a ton of money every year even to the point where the university is going to spend $288 million on renovations for Bryant-Denny Stadium. The fact that we will soon be spending millions of dollars already on the stadium makes me a little curious as to why there can not be a better internet connection added on.
Some may be confused as to why there even needs to be a better connection in the stadium. You’re already at a football game, that’s all the entertainment you’d need right? Well, this isn’t 2004, this is 2019 and social media is a massive part of the culture.
Every single Saturday in the fall, thousands of people post pictures and videos to various social media accounts. From my experience, students especially love posting videos of singing Dixie Land Delight, but most of the time need to wait to leave the stadium to post it. It also gives them the opportunity to easily track players statistics, or give a quick google search to a player who you may not have heard of before.
Now I do believe that Byrne and the rest of the athletic department are definitely putting in the effort to try and get people to stay longer. It isn’t fair to the players that fans aren’t there to support them after all of the hard work they put in. But at the same time, it feels as if they are trying to put some financial boundaries around their plans.
The football team had a total revenue of $108.2 million in 2018 with Forbes ranking them as the fourth most valuable team in all of college football. I’m not all that sure that money will be a huge issue for the university all things considered.
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Patrick Dowd is a Reporter for Touchdown Alabama Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter, via Pat_Dowd77.
