Odd things from College Stadiums: Bryant-Denny, Kyle Field, Neyland

quote:

---

Every year, Ian Brown has to explain to his students where they'll be heading for their first class project of the semester. It's Evergreen Cemetery, the University of Alabama professor will say. And more often than not, he'll be met by a series of blank stares. Someone will inevitably raise his or her hand and ask for directions.

"Then I ask, 'Do you know where the stadium is?' " Brown said. "They all know where that is." So at least they'll have an idea where to park.

While Bryant-Denny Stadium, built in 1929, is the center of campus life in the fall, what rests directly across the street is the exact opposite and goes almost entirely unnoticed.

More than 100,000 fans will walk around the iron gates of Evergreen Cemetery on any given football Saturday, but almost no one will go inside. If they did, they'd find a different world.

"It seems strange having a place of death located so close to all that life and activity and sports," Brown said. "But it is a part of our lives."

The cemetery was founded in the mid-1830s. The placement isn't ideal. It has made expansion and renovation tricky around the stadium. Moving cranes to work on the south end zone has been problematic.

While the land itself is worth a king's ransom, no one dares consider building upon it. "That would have created a scene," Brown said.

Evergreen Cemetery is still being used today, but new burials are limited to existing family plots.

Rufus Strickland, an area undertaker and Tide superfan, bought the burial plot closest to the stadium. Rumor has it he switched sides with his wife in order to be closer to the field.

Apparently Strickland had a clever side to him. His headstone reads: "Hi. Thanks for stopping by."

Conspicuously absent from the cemetery, however, are Alabama football players. Brown couldn't recall a single player buried there, though he did note that Eugene Allen Smith, who was instrumental in the formation of the football team, is laid to rest in the cemetery.

"Think if Joe Namath was buried out there," he said. "That place would be packed with visitors out there every day."

---

quote:

---

Texas A&M's Kyle Field has several unique aspects that distinguish it from other college football venues. Whether it's the sheer number of students who attend games (usually 30,000-plus), the fact that the stadium shook when fans swayed during the Aggie War Hymn (enough for Texas A&M media relations staff to include a warning to out-of-town reporters not to panic when the press box shook), the 12th Man or Midnight Yell, the Aggies are heavy on tradition.

Something else that has been a mainstay at Kyle Field are bats -- specifically, Mexican free-tailed bats.

Since the stadium opened in 1927, much of its existence has also been accompanied by the presence of the bats who found shelter in the stadium, often in its upper decks. An estimated 250,000 bats lived in the crevices of Kyle Field and the stadium has long been a "bat-friendly" zone, with signs posted in the old stadium alerting fans to their presence.

The Mexican free-tailed bats, which are the official flying mammal of Texas, were vigilant in controlling insects, with the population eating anywhere from 50 million to 150 million insects a night. The large population of bats was difficult to clean up after, though, with bat guano appearing throughout the stadium and requiring an estimated $150,000 per year in cleanup costs.

How many bats make it back this season to the newly redeveloped Kyle Field, which has undergone a complete renovation in the past two offseasons, is unclear, but it won't be nearly as many as before. During construction of the new Kyle Field, Texas A&M took measures to prevent bats from re-entering the stadium, which led to the mammals taking shelter in other places, like dorms or the campus natatorium, which had to be temporarily shut down this spring after numerous bats made their way in.

---

quote:

---

One summer when Phil Fulmer was a student at Tennessee, his job was to paint Neyland Stadium -- from the concession stands to the benches on the sideline -- and it afforded him a nuanced appreciation of one of the country's most celebrated venues.

"I've seen every nook and cranny of it," said Fulmer, who was the Volunteers' coach from 1992 to 2008.

From the locker rooms to the press box to the classrooms below the stadium, Fulmer knows Neyland as well as anyone. So when he tuned in to watch his cameo in the 2009 film "The Blind Side," which also featured the tale of bodies rising from their graves beneath the stadium, Fulmer was in on the joke.

This, of course, is an absurd exaggeration, but it did focus plenty of attention on Tennessee's anthropology department, which is located inside Neyland Stadium in rooms that used to serve as the players' dormitory.

"People still ask us about [The Blind Side] for sure," said Dr. Dawnie Steadman, director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at UT. "It pops up in popular culture in a number of ways, and there's always the good and the bad associated with that. The recognition is good, but we want the science represented properly."

There are more than 1,000 skeletons curated inside Neyland Stadium. Bodies are donated to the department, which then studies how they decompose at an off-site facility known colloquially as "The Body Farm."

The skeletons are then cleaned inside Neyland, where they are used to develop tests that help law enforcement identify the remains of unknown individuals.

"It allows researchers from all around the world to come and create new methods or validate existing methods," Steadman said. "So it's a tremendous research asset."

Of course, while there aren't ghouls hidden in the depths of the stadium, the field did hide some relics of the past, and they were unearthed in the mid-1990s.

For nearly 30 years, Tennessee used artificial turf to cover the field at Neyland.

"It really stunk in hot weather," team historian Tom Mattingly said. "In September, it smelled like asphalt."

It also wasn't exactly beneficial to the players' health, so when Fulmer took over as coach, he asked to have grass installed. But when the digging began, what Tennessee found were giant sinkholes beneath the stadium caused by the turf's poor drainage -- caverns filled with an assortment of items from Neyland's early years.

"They found bottles and other stuff that dated back to the 1920s when they built the stadium," Mattingly said.

In those early days of Neyland Stadium, Mattingly said there was a running joke between Gen. Robert Neyland and his groundskeeper.

"What about the grass?" Neyland would demand, to which his groundkeeper would retort: "My grass will be fine. What about your football team?"

Since the turf was pulled up and the sinkholes filled in 1994, the grass hasn't been a problem, and the orange-and-white checkerboard end zones remain the pride of Knoxville.

---