I’m a firm believer in the essence of a Tuscaloosa football Saturday. The town comes alive, opening up to “outsiders” roaming the streets before many students have gotten out of bed. The campus teems with activity, vendors dish out t-shirts and shakers, echoes of “Roll Tide!” reverberate through the air, and students line Colonial Drive, anxiously awaiting the flood gates to open and the show to start. At Alabama, a football game is more than just a date on the schedule. It’s a carnival atmosphere; it’s pomp and circumstance; it’s an emotional high.
After a 10-month hiatus, Saturday came with anticipation and long-awaited thrill, especially after the redemption last week in College Station, Texas. While Colorado State was a lackluster opponent, a football game is a football game, and we all know that the best ones are at Bryant-Denny. The energy is unquenchable; seas of shakers couple with the crowd’s roar. However, as halftime dawned over the student section, the stupor noticeably dulled. Despite a hold on block seating for the week and even a letter for support from Saban, the student section began to disperse.
The Crimson Tide commanded the lead in familiar fashion, but the hype plummeted as students filed out, leaving only a patchy north end zone. For all we proclaim our devotion to the Tide, other circumstances – decisive result, our boredom, or any other excuse – overpower the thrill. We cease to be entertained and back out of our commitment to the program that other schools can only envy.
Is this the ugly side of The Process? Have students become so accustomed to domination that the routine successes fail to excite us? I’ll admit to yielding to the “leave after halftime” mentality more times than I’m proud of, but what exactly are we forfeiting in our retreat? We abandon a team that’s done nothing but win championships and restore a tradition of pride that gives heartbeat to this campus. We take the atmosphere for granted, forgetting how a bottom spot of a Tide Pride wait list accompanies our diplomas. An early exit entails missing the program’s future front-runners, the freshmen and sophomores, make their debuts at the very end. Our student tickets, even though they yielded an increase from years past, pale in comparison to regular seating costs. Our departure isn’t just disrespect to the program; it’s a blow to the entire stadium.
SGA addressed the dilemma this year through its “Play for Four, Stay for Four” initiative, promoting the student section’s endurance by selecting a Fan of the Week each game and enforcing new block seating punishments for the consistently bare sections. They backed Tide Pride’s new implementations like the fresh point system, donation protocol and a cost increase to deter the uncommitted. Block seating remains, but freshmen file up to the upper deck, led in cheers and energy by First Year Experience’s inaugural Yell Crew.
Alabama’s home opening act revealed the road still left to travel. Granted, the opponent wasn’t necessarily on the radar, and the victory resembles a routine process. But will the SGA’s incentives be enough to renew the energy for 2013? The measures are a kick-start, but it’s the student section’s responsibility to carry them through. We can passionately proclaim our allegiance all we want, but ultimately the loudest support is sticking with the team from coin toss to coach’s handshake.
Allison Ingram is the Student Government Association’s The Crimson White liaison.
