There was wave of booing early in the Utah State game directed first toward the person who caught the football kicked through the uprights for the Aggies’ first extra point and hesitated chucking it out of the stadium, then toward the cops for ejecting the person who finally did manage to toss it.
You were just keeping with “semi-tradition”? The Jordan-Hare Powers That Be don’t really care.
“If that type of behavior occurred, as a minimum the person would be escorted from the stadium,” said Captain Tom Stofer of the Auburn police. “But, we could take other action.”
That other action is an arrest on a charge of theft of property. No arrests have been made in relation to the practice, but students are still annoyed by the possibility of punishment.
“It’s just a football,” said Adam Lucy, freshman in biomedical sciences. “It’s just kind of a waste of time for them. It’s not like they need it.”
Kirk Sampson with athletic media relations says that police have discretion in the stadium to carry out the policies in place.
The Auburn Fan Guide lays out the law on throwing anything from Jordan-Hare.
“Do not throw objects, including cups and ice, from the stands or any other area of the stadium. Anyone caught throwing objects will be subject to ejection from the stadium and/or arrest.”
… pigskin peer-pressure be damned.
Read the full story here.
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This isn’t just an Auburn thing. They do it in Alabama’s student section (and I would imagine just about everywhere) as well, unless they started arresting people since I graduated. Seems like a really stupid thing to “crack down” on.
I don’t want them to have to put up a net behind the goal posts.
Normally the balls make it back into the stadium after they’re thown out. Seems a little overkill to me. Not criminal, just a pain for the other team’s ball boys.
I think throwing the ball out of the stadium is stupid. Not the best show of Auburn class.
I was standing on the ramp by the student section for the MSU game. After the ball is thrown out the stadium, there is someone, either a ball boy or an athletic department employee, who retrieves the football for the university.
A few footballs did come close to hitting the police officers guarding that entrance to the stadium though.
I worked for Troy’s Football team Earlier this decade as a student manager and I can tell you I would have been mad enough to fight someone if they threw one of our footballs out of stadium. Getting a ball “game ready” isn’t just opening a case and airing it up. It requires a process to break it in and rough the outside edges up so that it is not as slick. They are also not your garden variety Wal-Mart footballs, with your schools emblem stamped on they cost upwards of 70 dollars. That “ball boy” you speak of is actually a college student who is working for the athletic department who works longer hours than the football players and is lucky if he gets close to a half tuition scholaship….
But ball boys aren’t good at football, so that’s the way it should be.
Honestly, it would make much more sense just have someone sitting outside the stadium in the area of the south end zone to gather them up. Honestly, they need to stop making something out of nothing
I was told that when the goalposts were torn down after the 2001 UF game (I don’t want to talk about why I wasn’t there to see it myself), some students toted or passed one of the goalposts up to the side of the stadium to throw them over, before the guy on the PA convinced them not to. Anyone know if there is truth to that?
Yes, that is what happened after the ’01 Florida game. I was in the band. That was one CRAZY scene.