Pack Out Bobby Dodd

[gtee91]

Watching on TV from Northern Virginia the Lower East stands looked packed. The Upper East had a decent amount of people as did the North Stands. Never saw the West stands on TV. The South Stands were empty except for the students paintes white with unreadable letters spelling out something. Crowd sounded good on TV. How was the atmosphere at the game?

Even louder than you imagined from the TV...very critical of the refs

 

[MountainBuzzMan]

An improvement for sure, but a long way from a sellout, even with seats removed. But, let's see if we can string together a few 10 win seasons as someone said and fill it up...

What was frustrating was the empty seats but so many students were turned away. My section was a little lame but I had 50% Ga State fans around me so they did not have much to cheer about. But in general best atmosphere since the good CPJ teams.

 

[apatriot1776]

Watching on TV from Northern Virginia the Lower East stands looked packed. The Upper East had a decent amount of people as did the North Stands. Never saw the West stands on TV. The South Stands were empty except for the students paintes white with unreadable letters spelling out something. Crowd sounded good on TV. How was the atmosphere at the game?

Apparently all students got rejected from the South stands until the 2nd quarter, at which point it filled out completely. Meanwhile the North was over capacity. Failure of event management

 

[Ramble1885]

From the upper east it felt like more than 40k, but I will take it!

When you’re at a game, it always feels like more people than it is because of how great our stadium is at making noise. The UNC game last year game had 35K, it sounded like 50K.

 

[gtee91]

Apparently all students got rejected from the South stands until the 2nd quarter, at which point it filled out completely. Meanwhile the North was over capacity. Failure of event management

If you study this you see the two security guards in yellow shirts blocking the entrances...preventing students from filling the sections....it is total madness...surely they did not understand the assignment

 

[AUFC]

They need to teach the ticketing kiosk folks how to use the NFC scanners. Once I got to the front of the line, it became apparent the reason for the absurd ingress backups was that people don't know how to scan NFC tickets. No hate to anyone else who struggled - I made an absolute idiot of myself at the Benz (and learned my lesson) for 30 seconds one time trying to get into an Atlanta United game. I get the need to support NFC and QR codes, but the UX design on these devices is atrocious because nobody knows that little radiating speaker logo is where you need to tap your phone. Instead, people spend 20 seconds trying to scan their non-existent QR code underneath it while the attendants were standing by aimlessly waiting for the green light and beeping success sound.

 

[4shotB]

The Georgia Tech-centric internet is bursting with at the seams with negative gameday experiences from yesterday. I know these things are logistically challenging to put on and I don't expect GTAA to bat 1.000 but yesterday was just challenge after challenge from parking to stadium experience. I don't think I really even personally scratched the surface of some of the experiences people have mentioned, especially with regards to security. It's just frustrating when you have all these new and "born again" fans excited to support a really talented team and they have a negative first impression. Especially wild to me when we have the best industrial engineering department in the country.

Georgia Tech has never practiced what it preaches. This was true back in the "70's when I was there and has continued. IMHO, Coach Key has a far easier task changing the culture of the team than J Batt has in changing the culture of the GTAA. That group is the very embodiment of the dreaded word "bureaucracy". Keep at it JBatt, we are all rooting for you!!!!!!!! This group is in dire need of an overhaul.

 

[roadkill]

Georgia Tech has never practiced what it preaches. This was true back in the "70's when I was there and has continued. IMHO, Coach Key has a far easier task changing the culture of the team than J Batt has in changing the culture of the GTAA. That group is the very embodiment of the dreaded word "bureaucracy". Keep at it JBatt, we are all rooting for you!!!!!!!! This group is in dire need of an overhaul.

J. Batt needs to know what happened with the ingress and student wristband issues. He can't fix what he doesn't know is broken. (Unless he reads this board - in that case he has my sympathy)

 

[RonJohn]

They need to teach the ticketing kiosk folks how to use the NFC scanners. Once I got to the front of the line, it became apparent the reason for the absurd ingress backups was that people don't know how to scan NFC tickets. No hate to anyone else who struggled - I made an absolute idiot of myself at the Benz (and learned my lesson) for 30 seconds one time trying to get into an Atlanta United game. I get the need to support NFC and QR codes, but the UX design on these devices is atrocious because nobody knows that little radiating speaker logo is where you need to tap your phone. Instead, people spend 20 seconds trying to scan their non-existent QR code underneath it while the attendants were standing by aimlessly waiting for the green light and beeping success sound.

View attachment 16745

Where I went thru she was using a handheld device. I had the ticket open on the phone. She put the hand held device against my phone, but it didn't work. She had be pull up the code and scanned the code. That worked. However, it must have automatically scanned in all three of my tickets with that one code because the other two codes showed an error when scanning. She just waved us through after about 45 seconds of trying the other tickets.

Overall the stadium entrance process was very very bad on the North side of the stadium. At 7:00 they were sending everyone away from the many metal detectors at the North gate saying that those were only for students. Everyone in the North stands and people from the North side of the West gates were funneled through 4 metal detectors at the Northeast gates. Took me more than 20 minutes to get in the stadium at 7:00.

 

[4shotB]

J. Batt needs to know what happened with the ingress and student wristband issues. He can't fix what he doesn't know is broken. (Unless he reads this board - in that case he has my sympathy)

I am guessing (hoping?) that J Batt is too intelligent to read this board!

 

[roadkill]

I am guessing (hoping?) that J Batt is too intelligent to read this board!

If he does, he likely raises the average IQ of our board members while simultaneously lowering his own.

 

[MountainBuzzMan]

Where I went thru she was using a handheld device. I had the ticket open on the phone. She put the hand held device against my phone, but it didn't work. She had be pull up the code and scanned the code. That worked. However, it must have automatically scanned in all three of my tickets with that one code because the other two codes showed an error when scanning. She just waved us through after about 45 seconds of trying the other tickets.

Overall the stadium entrance process was very very bad on the North side of the stadium. At 7:00 they were sending everyone away from the many metal detectors at the North gate saying that those were only for students. Everyone in the North stands and people from the North side of the West gates were funneled through 4 metal detectors at the Northeast gates. Took me more than 20 minutes to get in the stadium at 7:00.

They finally gave up a few minutes before kickoff and just funneled everyone through. It did not matter if the metal detector found something or not. Then for the tickets they just looked at our phone wallet to see if it had 5 tickets for the 5 of us and just waived us through without scanning. I would say a few thousand went through the none student north gate without being scanned. We went from not moving for 10 minutes to the whole herd blasting into the stadium

 

[BeeRBee]

I am guessing (hoping?) that J Batt is too intelligent to read this board!

I would say if he doesn’t have someone monitoring every GT message board they are aware of plus Reddit, X, etc. he’s leaving himself uninformed.

 

[GT33]

J. Batt needs to know what happened with the ingress and student wristband issues. He can't fix what he doesn't know is broken. (Unless he reads this board - in that case he has my sympathy)

The list of woes must be making his head explode.

We announced student tickets were sold out, then saw a half empty section with no students in the seats. Surely we're capable of multiplying the number of rows times the number of seats in a row?

 

[Lil G]

View attachment 16744
If you study this you see the two security guards in yellow shirts blocking the entrances...preventing students from filling the sections....it is total madness...surely they did not understand the assignment

This needs to be fixed immediately.
If I bought a ticket and then wasn’t allowed in until the 2nd quarter, I would be having some sort drunk conniption outside the stadium.

I have to imagine this gave at least one kid a negative impression of game day, and rightfully so. That is one kid too many considering how bad we’ve needed more students the past 8 seasons.

 

[AUFC]

This needs to be fixed immediately.
If I bought a ticket and then wasn’t allowed in until the 2nd quarter, I would be having some sort drunk conniption outside the stadium.

I have to imagine this gave at least one kid a negative impression of game day, and rightfully so. That is one kid too many considering how bad we’ve needed more students the past 8 seasons.

I read that the men's basketball team got into an altercation with security in the North endzone as well. Naturally this all went down when we were hosting these guys for on campus visits (not sure if official or unofficial):

Not sure if they were part of the altercation and also not really sure if it would move the needle at all on their recruiting efforts, but I would hate to have seen them had a bad Saturday evening when this was penned to be a great introduction to the type of fanbase they would get to play in front of in McCamish.

 

[AUFC]

nm

 

[AUFC]

View attachment 16744
If you study this you see the two security guards in yellow shirts blocking the entrances...preventing students from filling the sections....it is total madness...surely they did not understand the assignment

Finally got some intel on this from the Georgia Tech subreddit - someone from GTAA told security to only allow students who could confirm south season tickets (the additional 600 released after north season tickets sold out) into the first 10 or so rows (you'll see a smattering of folks in the front row in this photo). Of course most of those folks just snuck into the North. Everyone you see above claimed a free South ticket and could not present season ticket credentials. Mind numbing stuff from GTAA. Thankfully someone came to their senses and told security to release seating after the 4th and goal stop in the 1st quarter.