(12-14-2019 10:31 AM)quo vadis Wrote: (12-13-2019 07:22 PM)CardinalJim Wrote: Memphis fans will tell you Tennessee fans are different.
I have only encountered Tennessee fans one time - in 1998 when I attended the first BCS national championship game, the Fiesta Bowl between FSU and Tennessee. I was staying in Tempe at the time and met a lot of them. And to a man or woman, the UT fans were the nicest and most courtly fans I have ever met. Impeccable behavior, and that was leading up to the game, not after they won.
Perhaps that's because maybe the 'better element' of the fan base is able to travel such that it might be different at a UT home game, but that was my experience.
And there were a TON of them too, the UT fans outnumbered the FSU fans like 4 to 1 or something.
I've been to a lot of venues. And what I've witnessed at each is essentially the same with minor variations. When schools come to your venue their travel crowds are way nicer than their home crowds. This is due to a couple of factors. Travel crowds are usually made up of those who donate to the athletic department which is how they rate travel tickets. So you are dealing with a more affluent element of that team's fan base, and people who are usually more connected to the school itself and therefore are conscious of their behavior, or they are parents of athletes and most of those I've ever met are just happy to talk to you about their son or daughter who is playing.
At the Auburn home baseball games we sat for nearly 30 years with the visiting players parents over the first base dugout. The only fan base that was consistently difficult to deal with was Vanderbilt. Everyone else was wonderful whether SEC or not. I particularly loved the L.S.U. baseball fans who were very courteous, extremely knowledgeable about the players and the game, and loved talking baseball. South Carolina baseball fans and Mississippi State baseball fans were very much the same. I'd give a ditto to the North Carolina and Virginia parents we've sat with as well.
For football and baseball the issues, if there were going to be any, would happen when we visited their venues and were accosted or taunted or even threatened by drunken T-shirt fans who for the most part were not alumni of that school. In that regard Gainesville was one of the rougher places to go when Charlie Pell who encouraged that behavior was the Head Coach at Florida.
In Baton Rouge it's the combination of playing at night and the volume of alcohol consumed by the lower end of their fan base that makes it intimidating, but not dangerous. I'd say the experiences of Auburn and L.S.U. fans in Morgantown were much worse.
At UGA the biggest hazard is having a half gallon whisky bottle tossed off of the upper deck and being hit by the shards of flying glass when it shatters on the concrete steps below which I experienced there in the 80's.
Auburn home games are no different. The drunken % of non alumni is small like it is everywhere, but it is very noticeable and 99% of the time the only source of trouble.
This is why I was against alcohol sales at the game. Most of them have boozed it up all day getting ready for the kick. If anything good comes from not selling alcohol it is that most of them fall sullen and silent by halftime as their hangover ensues. Continuing their beer consumption for 3 quarters will only make them belligerent for a longer period of time.
As far as feeling threatened by students I never have anywhere and the only place where students were reportedly a consistent part of the problem was Morgantown. And it should be noted that most of the West Virginia crowd were polite. It was just the small % of bad actors that took it over the top and WVU travel crowds were genuinely nice like they are with most schools.
So my decades of going tell me that problems are confined to the drunk, and non alums pretty much everywhere.
L.S.U. folks do imbibe in greater amounts than anyone I've witnessed outside of UGA folks. But their travel crowd for football is still quite amicable. And the nice thing about them is that they are so drunk after the game that they don't contribute to the traffic jam. They stay around the stadium and tailgate areas until the crowd has thinned and they sober up a bit and then they leave.