Tulane Football is coming home to campus this year, and you should be freaking out. New stadium, new conference, new Tulane culture.
Growing up in a big college sports town, I felt like the camaraderie, excitement, and community of sports and fandom was something I gave up when I chose Tulane. Seeing pictures of my friends at Big Ten and SEC schools having wild times on game day and brimming with school spirit actually hurt my heart a little. But this year, Tulane Athletics is getting re-charged in a big way when football returns to campus after nearly forty years away.
For the last 38 years, Tulane’s home has been the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in central New Orleans. Although it’s a beautiful stadium, getting on a bus and riding away from campus to sit in an over-air-conditioned, oversized, under-populated stadium really just sucks the life and energy out of an event. Everything about game day was just underwhelming, and back at campus you wouldn’t even have known a game was going on.
But come September 6th, things are going to be a lot different. Late each Friday night, the LBC quad will begin to transform into a tent-covered tailgating central, largely modeled after The Grove at Ole Miss (Nunez). By Saturday morning the lawn will be unrecognizable, filled with students, alumni, and other city locals. There will even be a Mardi-Gras style float to usher us all into Yulman Stadium as kickoff approaches. The new stadium features state-of-the-art-turf, massive scoreboards and a student tunnel that feeds onto McAlister Drive. It seats 30,000 and with 86% of season tickets already sold as of late July, (Kushner) the atmosphere of a populated stadium will be completely different.
Brandon MacNeill, the Green Wave’s executive associate athletic director, agrees, saying, “This is going to change the culture of our campus. A lot of our alumni used to come into town as groups and never come back to campus. Now, we are going to host more people at one time than have been here in 40 years, and we have to make it worth it. We finally have the pomp and pageantry of college football” (Kushner). But with all the new exciting things also comes new challenges such as parking, trash removal, and crowd management, which were all previously handled by the Superdome’s staff.
The first game in the new stadium will be held September 6th when we take on Georgia Tech. In addition to the brand-new facility and the added excitement of tailgating, you should actually be very excited about football itself this year too. Following last year’s first winning season and first bowl game since 2002, our team is on the rise. Additionally, we have made the switch from the Conference USA to the American Conference. The American Conference is much more competitive and our non-conference schedule will be tough, (we’ll be playing Duke and Rutgers away in back to back weeks) but being a part of this new conference arrangement will help cement our status as a rising football program. This fall will be an incredibly exciting time to be a Tulane student, as we set the tone and traditions of Tulane Football for years to come.
Sources:
http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/sports/958190...
http://www.nola.com/tulane/index.ssf/2014/07/tulan...