re: How tone deaf is Joe Alleva when it comes to this corporate tailgating company?

Warning; tldr

Reading through this thread there are a great many folks who either came to LSU as fans in Football without their parents or grandparents indoctrinating them...or their standard of living has allowed them to detach from the lessons of those who have. I’m happy for them. I’ll never begrudge folks success.

There has always been a purple jacket, fat-cat, elitist LSU Fan. Always. Look no further than the true patriarch of our program himself...the Kingfish. Huey Long. He was Phil Knight before Phil Knight was cool. Only he was the most powerful man in the State and even made folks in DC nervous about running for POTUS.

But he approached the football team differently. He poured his money into the program, but also provided for the fanbase. He worked to promote LSU-eliminating competitors like the circus and the story of quarantining the elephants in it at the border-while giving folks who weren’t so well-heeled an opportunity to dive into the program headfirst and fall in love with it.

He hired band leaders. Sometimes almost against their will to create our chants and songs that make up our fanbase’s canon and tradition. He set up train rides to away games and staged, “takeover parades,” through the streets of opposing cities. He literally led the march in these things. He made it so that the average joe-and even folks beneath joe-could attend games and associate with the program.

This effort paid off with the fanbase you see into the present day. But slowly since the retirement of Bertman, you’ve seen the University attempt to monetize that fervor for the program. That connection with the team. Much moreso than trying to sell jerseys and shoes and t-shirts.

It’s sinister. You see the average joe who used to park in the Hay Lots and set up a tent or two with a grill, a TV or radio and an ice chest or two has two options now:

Park over 1 mile away (literally it’s a mile from the Stadium round trip for some folks now), be harassed by parking cops telling you to park 8 inches away from your neighbor, and forget about tailgating.

Or...

Pay an exorbitant amount of $ to have a parking pass and hopefully some semblance of a tailgate. For decades, these people have had multiple generations come out to campus and spend their money in town and come to the game. These aren’t the frats stumbling around in a drunken stupor or youngsters assaulting each other with casts on and cameraphones rolling. These are families and season ticket holders who are responsible for the roar of the crowd on Saturday Night in Death Valley. Who want to steep their kids and their grandkids in this tradition.

They keep moving these folks further and further away from campus. They keep walking by paved hayfield lots. Cordoned off intramural fields that could easily house more tailgaters at no cost or expense to the University. More room to do what they’ve always done. Which is create the very experience LSU wants to capitalize and monetize and cash in on...charging them for the privilege of something they themselves were responsible for creating.

Inside the Stadium they see huge electronic replay boards that don’t even use the entire screen. Instead, they have stationary, static images of Powerade, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s on them. Why the school got replay boards this big only to not use the entire screen or just create stationary billboards on either side of the huge replay board, we’ll never know. But we do know they’re using something ostensibly for fan enjoyment to-again-monetize and cash in on them.

We hear R&B and rap music instead of the band playing traditional fight songs. We sound more like a Pelicans or Saints game than an LSU Game. Again, people not responsible for the culture making decisions about what the culture wants to experience. Ill conceived, and idiotic.

There was a time where not only the Kingfish types...not just the purple jacket crowd...had a place in this fanbase. In may ways, the former provided for the latter’s enjoyment to the fullest. They found ways to keep EVERYONE involved and enjoying things.

Now, we cater to the well-heeled and corral the average joes like cattle and scatter them to the edges of campus. Screw their gameday campus experience. They won’t pay, so who gives a frick about them.

...and before you think this is some screed from some 70 year old geezer, I’m in my 30’s. I went to school here. My family has owned season tickets for nearly a quarter century. We were here predating Saban. We sat through the good-and bad-days of the DiNardo Era. We were here prior to championships.

But we’ve renewed for the final time. Joe Alleva, F. King and Munsonruther (whomever he is) have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that their focus is monetizing a culture we created at all costs. What the average fan wants or needs they could give three shits about. Hence my patio and 50” hung on the side of it.

There is a way to keep everyone happy. There are ways to allow folks to continue to enjoy campus and GameDay for free. But the search for the almighty dollar must take a backseat to that path...and those at the top have an appetite too voracious for extracting every single possible dollar and creating as much profit from it as possible in order to take that path.

frick those guys.