re: Bama Fans: Will You Admit Tiger Stadium at Night on 11/03/12 Scares You?

I don't know about the mystique. I went once and will never go back. For the most part, I like LSU folks outside the stadium.

My first year at UA, I had a cape-wearing LSU fan pounding on my door at 8 am on gameday, asking if I had any orange juice. When I said, "yes," he proudly announced, "I have vodka!" That part of the LSU fan base is great and fun to be around. In grad school I did research at Hill Library and you couldn't find a better, more helpful group of people than the ones I ran into on the LSU campus that week. I like too that the stadium is actually a dormitory and was built with WPA money during the Depression. The fact that Huey Long wrote the fight song is cool, too. All of those great things about LSU are why I'm so puzzled by the game time experience on the LSU campus.

The part of LSU that I saw in and around Tiger stadium at game time, however, was an embarrassment to Louisiana and LSU. Vulgar, degrading comments directed to female UA fans, spitting, threats of violence, etc, and that was before I even got inside the stadium. I sat in the section reserved for Alabama players' parents, which was surrounded by chain link fence. For nearly the entire game, there was a guy hanging on the fence, two feet from me, yelling, screaming, threatening, and generally being a nuisance to civil society. There's no need to act like animals. If "Death Valley" is such a intimidating place to play, why not leave the intimidation to the 11 guys on the field? Harassing the opponent's fan base doesn't gain yards during the game.

If Bama lets the noise bother them, then yes, Tiger stadium will be an advantage. But it'll only be an advantage if Bama lets it bother them and there's not too much LSU can do about that.