I miss more than anything in this modern era of college football? I miss the sound of those old metal bleachers at Sanford Stadium before they put in all the chairbacks. The way the whole section would shake when we got a big third down and the student section would start stomping their feet in unison. You cannot replicate that with all these fancy renovations and luxury boxes they keep adding on. I remember sitting in the north end zone back in the early 80s, before they enclosed it, and you could feel the chill coming off the October air and smell the boiled peanuts from the vendors outside. That was real football.
We used to park on somebody's lawn off Milledge Avenue for five dollars and walk through the hedges, the actual hedges, not the replants they had to put in after the 1996 Olympics nonsense. And the tailgating was different too. It was families and old friends, not these corporate tents with flat screens and catered barbecue. You would see the same faces every home game, folks who had been coming since the Vince Dooley years, and we would talk about the 1980 championship like it was yesterday because it was still fresh in our minds.
Now I walk into that stadium and it feels like a sterile NFL facility. The video boards are so big you cannot even see the sky anymore and they play music during every timeout like we cannot entertain ourselves. The 1992 SEC Championship Game team would have won it all if they had half the facilities these kids get today but they did not need all that. They had a fire in them that came from playing in a stadium that felt like home, not a corporate entertainment venue.
I know they had to upgrade for safety and all that but something got lost along the way. The soul of the place is different now. You used to be able to hear the band playing Glory Glory between plays and now it is all piped in noise and sponsored segments on the big screen. Give me the old days when the loudest thing in the stadium was 92,000 people screaming their lungs out without any help from the sound sysem. That was real.