Kirby has a gripe.
Honestly, I didn’t tune in to the number of fans or whether the stands were full or not. The Marshall game was one of the more affordable games out there, at least on the third-party ticket market.
Where do you stand on the matter? Do you agree with Kirby, or do you agree with Brandon Adams’ take?
Discuss.
Kirby’s response was perfectly reasonable. Not sure what Brandon is talking about. Is Kirby supposed to hold a raffle for the fans that stay until the end? How do you “incentivize” attendance beyond putting a great product on the field?
But then, I’m wired differently I guess. I agree that there are only so many games and I couldn’t imagine not going to a game while I was a student there. As an adult, I had life commitments that got in the way, but I still attended many games until I moved too far away.
I will say now that the experience has become more…artificial? canned? different than when I went to school, I don’t enjoy it as much. But if I lived within an easy drive of Athens, I imagine I’d still be going.
Artificial? Canned? How about too goddamn expensive for most fans to swing anymore? I’m pretty sure that’s what Brandon is talking about.
Okay, I was thinking “student” when he said “fan”, but yeah you’re point certainly is a main one. The only affordable tickets are to the shitty games now, and you still pay an arm and a leg for anything inside the stadium. It’s become an NFL experience, which is not what I want, or have ever wanted.
But they will make up for the lack of attendance with PSL and corporate boxes. They’ve just about killed the goose.
The full-price seats were full early on. It’s the cheap student seats that were empty at the start. The stadium emptied because it was a blowout and quite hot if you weren’t in the shade.
My friend’s daughter (I know) told us her Friday classes were switched to remote and several of her sorority sisters (apparently like a lot of other students) went home for the long weekend. Everyone in my tailgate group were surprised at the atmosphere. Didn’t seem like the usual game day energy.
I’ll side with Kirby over that pompous ass Brandon Adams. Used to listen to him, but his whiny tone will get on your last nerve.
I’m with you. What’s he want two hot dogs and Coke then go to a game at CMR field.
Kirby could have likely said anything up to and including “bite me,” and I still wouldn’t agree with Brandon Adams take on virtually anything. He’s trying to drive clicks and views for Dawgnation. If there’s no controversy on the field or with the team, he has to try creating one in the stands.
Reason number 10,038 why the last print edition of the AJC will be December 31, 2025.
Left at halftime and didn’t get home until 8PM. Didn’t want to roll in at 10 o’clock as my 12 year old had to be up early on Sunday. If the game lasted two hours I’d have stayed til the end.
First..not Kirby’s job so why ask such a stupid question. How disingenuous of Adams to try to insert a wedge between Kirby and the fans. I’m guessing it was a sellout with 90k in attendance at the start. So what if folks leave early during a cupcake blowout in the heat to enjoy a beautiful early evening. F that guy.
My friends who went said it was not a sellout and there were a lot of empty seats, and it emptied in the second half. I think it was due to the holiday weekend and bad competition, but also restrictions on selling student tickets. They need to figure that out.
It was a holiday weekend. Traditionally low attendance.
Want to boost attendance for every game?
1. Make the games end quicker. 3.5 – 4 hours is a LONG time in the weather.
2. Better seats. The bleachers suck.
3. Better opponents.
4. Make parking more available/easier/cheaper
I rather enjoy watching ass whoopings, but I get why everyone leaves. Adults sometimes have other commitments than watching kids play a game in a hot stadium drinking shitty $14 beers.
Creature Comforts is shitty beer?
$5 Creature Comforts is tolerable beer. At $14 it definitely is shitty.
Agree wholeheartedly. When did it become the fan’s duty to spend several hundred dollars, sit in the sun, & watch a shitty game. It us up to Georgia to create the event to gave fans come and stay
Sanford Stadium is. In the middle of campus with b active railroad behind it. What campus buildings do you raze to mak3 parking more available?
The secret to getting everyone to stay until a cupcake game ends is make everyone go to the game with a 9 year old boy, like my son, who wants to stay until the game is over and then go down to get close to the players after the game to try to talk to them and get pics and autographs. I was ready to leave when they quit selling beer in the 4th quarter, but this is one thing I will let the boy get his way with. I’m not gonna make a diehard 9y.o. fan leave early if he is adamant about staying. He was yelling louder than anyone until the last whistle too (unfortunately for those around us, haha)!
It looked pretty packed to me at kickoff and 1st quarter. Didn’t see hardly any empty seats. I didn’t have a view of the 600 sections because I was lower level visitor side. But everywhere I could see was full. We waited until 10:00 the night before and scored aisle seat tickets for $80 each after all fees. That’s about the most affordable game our family can get to this year.
I’m on board with Kirby. Obviously a lot of “fans” are trying to make money with their privilege instead of going to the game themselves or finding someone who wants to go.
If we want to be the standard of college football, we need to act accordingly and play our roles.
You can’t tell me that there weren’t 150k or more Georgia fans who would have loved to have been in that stadium Saturday.
They need to replicate some sort of “railroad track crowd/standing room only” area in that place and sell them at face, first come first serve.
We go and get there early and stay until the game is over. I can’t see paying the amount tickets cost and not savoring every minute. It would be like leaving a play early. I always feel glee when the stands have emptied and as the people leaving the team makes a huge play.
Blame bobo for successful UGA football run game, not much innovative passing in game plan, nobody wants to see UGA football score 45-50ish points on the opposition via the ground game….exception being the Fucking handbags and their hogtown yell leader/ambassador, plaster those mofo’s with 50ish anytime UGA football can…#FTMF!!
I imagine there’s a segment of our fan base – both students and alums – that has been spoiled during the Kirby era, so for them a cupcake game blowout isn’t worth their time. They’re saving themselves for the big games.
Back in mah day… as a student during Goff’s Reign of Terror, we stayed til the end of every game when we were winning because we wanted to savor them. I won’t lie and say that I stayed when we were on the receiving end of an ass whippin’, mainly because I wanted to get my hands on a beer ASAP.
The times have changed. I think it’s only going to get worse as these games become more and more unaffordable.
Lets face it the North Stands are a heat stroke waiting to happen. My tickets, when I was young enough to climb the steps, were in the South Stands 300 section. We were in the shade by 2 O’clock. The North stands tickets should come with free Power Aid to keep the fans and students alive. I won’t ever say anything about fans leaving a blow out when the weather is too hot.
A lot of chatter about the heat from people that left early. I ended up watching at the tailgate with some friends because the Verizon outage on my phone boned my ticket transfer. smh. Of all the time not to get bleep sorted Friday night, lol
I am a bit surprised by some of the vitriol for Brandon, and it sounds like some folks don’t really know his point.
He’s talked about this on his show … basically, his point is that digital tickets exchanged via online marketplaces (Ticketmaster, StubHub, etc.) create transaction costs that price out a lot of would-be attendees. In other words, it’s not an efficient way to put Dawg fans into seats, especially for games like Marshall.
The example on his show was that 15 or 20 years ago, if a young family wanted to go to the Marshall game, they could be reasonably confident that they could scalp tickets from someone standing outside the game for, like, 10 or 15 bucks a pop. That rings true to me. In fact, for years, I remember people just giving tickets away to other Dawg fans at tailgates. Now, the tickets are mostly exchanged via an online marketplace that charges 15 or 20 bucks per ticket in transaction fees alone. In other words, the price of attendance via the secondary marketplace has an artificial floor that puts it out alignment with the demand for tickets in games like this. The guy with 4 season tickets in Section 310 who’s only using 2 of those tickets for Marshall can no longer just sell the other two for 10 bucks on the way in to the game. If he wants to try and sell them, he has to post them on a website days in advance and hope that someone is willing to pay $40 or so bucks per ticket. Otherwise, they probably go unused. Not to mention that student tickets are no longer paper either, and I don’t know if they can be sold on the open market at all.
Anyway, I thought it was a fairly reasonable observation that’s worth considering as part of the problem.
In a broader sense, though, boy … we got some tough critics around here. Compared to other podcast content that exists out there, Brandon Adams’ show is like freakin’ Sesame Street! I’m kind of shocked that anyone would think of him as a pompous muckraker! If anything, he’s a little boring, but he’s generally affable, clearly loves the dawgs, and puts out an HOUR LONG SHOW EVERY DAY about my favorite topic on earth! So, he’s alright with me.
Welcome Mr Adams.
Lol!
lol. I wish. I’d love nothing more than to chat about football and hawk Dr. Pepper every day for a living.
I’ve only heard him in small doses, because that’s all I can take, and I heard him more when he was on 680. His podcast seems that he takes 10 minutes telling the listener what he’s going to tell them, then 30 minutes telling them what could have been told in 5 minutes. He does two segments of that and he’s got an hour-plus of “content.” It’s certainly a matter of personal opinion, which everyone is entitled to, but I simply don’t care for him.
I imagine his content fluctuates a lot depending on the time of year. It seems to be more substantive and thoughtful during the season. But totally true that there’s a good bit of fluff and advertisement in there.
Overall, I think it’s pretty fun and easy. I heard him do a bit one time about how UT’s Smokey looked like the kind of dog that lives under a porch and didn’t deserve to share a field with Uga, and he had a listener for life after that.
Like most who come to this place, I’ve got an insatiable appetite for UGA content. I’m curious if anyone around here has any other good podcast suggestions. Seems like there’s a lot of options out there these days.
His constant “like” and “sort of” drive me up the fucking wall.
Let’s be honest. It’s a shitty business model that relies solely on the built-in passion of the fans for the product. Any other entertainment product that was set at the same price point with a similar level of aggravation and mediocre customer service wouldn’t make it past game two. The product of UGA football is still top shelf. You just have to deal with a lot of negatives to get to it. Still love it, but thank god for HD tv.
Is it just me? It looked like the concentrations of empty seats were mostly in the student sections. I know there were folks leaving early. In my section, that was mostly in the fourth quarter when the starters had become spectators and it was mostly people with children who were hot, tired, and in danger of becoming dehydrated who were leaving. Now, let’s talk about the TV timeouts, each over three minutes. It was hot. There was nothing happening on the field. The only thing to do was watch the time out guy with his sign slowly counting down the seconds. It got worse when his sign broke and you didn’t know how long until the time out was over.
He that has the gold makes the rules. Look at the Super Bowl and the Natty game. The SB is nothing but a studio show with a football game. Expect even longer timeouts with ESPN paying the conference extra millions for 9 conference game per season.
It took 20 minutes to play the final 2:11 of the second quarter.
The obvious answer is for Kirby to keep games close and not score so dang much. Tighter games are more exciting and people will stay to watch the nailbiter.
/s
There were large holes in the 300 level student section … cough, cough … the Greek sections … cough, cough. That had nothing to do with students going home early and everything to do with staying at their houses.
Lots of the Senior Greek folks went to Las Vegas last weekend. Package deals with super cheap flights and hotels.
Nothing burger is correct, there was a great crowd at the start of the game, and once the game was a blow-out, you cannot blame anyone sitting in the sun for leaving.
I am glad Austin Peay is also a 3:30pm kick-off, because if it was a nooner, Brandon Adams would be asking more stupid questions.
With a family of 5 that lives out of state, it is simply too damn expensive to attend any home game, let alone an SEC home game, let along a home game against a quality opponent. Could I shell out $1k (tickets + hotel + travel) for a home game against Marshall or Austin Peay? Sure, but I won’t.
Kirby is really gonna “pissed” after this Saturday’s attendance. In reality he is trying to keep the stadium full for the recruiting angle. Come 7:30 on 9/27/25 that place will be at defcon 1.
It’s a lot of little things, really.
Yes to what folks above have mentioned regarding digital tickets making it harder for folks to get into the games (as it’s made it more expensive to sell/give away, plus, with it not being a tangible ticket, it’s easier just to not use it).
Yes to the in-game experience still not being improved enough to encourage folks to leave their homes, where they can get food and drink easily (why did the vendors in the aisles, selling cold drinks during a hot game, never arrive? Are they just not going to do that anymore? And what’s the obsession with Modelo?) and where their ears are not assaulted by LOUD SPEAKERS (say what you will about the Redcoats’ music selections, but at least they don’t make you want to cover your ears in pain at the volume). I know they *can* turn down the speakers, because they *did* (during injuries); when fewer people are in the stands, it makes the speakers sound even louder (as people aren’t there to absorb the sound). The Mic Guy (cheerleader) gave the *slowest* “It’s…Great……..To…Be………A…Georgia……………Bulldog!” chant I’ve ever heard; William Shatner would be envious of that delivery. The Stadium Singalong used songs no one knew or could sing; they kept showing folks Not Singing Along on the Jumbotron. So, yes: A less than optimal stadium experience.
Yes to the game itself being intentionally boring. Kirby/Bobo/whoever likes to take the air out of the ball at the end of the game. That’s fine — however, if the third-string offense is just going to hand off, hand off, and sneak, *why would we want to stick around to watch that*?!? If the coaches want folks to stay for the end of the game, give people something to look forward to, something exciting. And, above all, don’t give fans bland football and tell them they should be grateful for the experience.
(And let the band f***-ing play. Sheesh. The DJ is crappy, cheap, and reminds me of what *lesser* schools [who don’t have Sousa-award-winning bands] do. Have some f***-ing pride in your team, your cheerleaders, and your band; let them do their jobs.)
Lot of folks can’t go every weekend. When I go I understand it’s going to be expensive (not just the tickets), so I rarely go if we’re playing the cupcakes. Bottom line, the stadium would be full if we weren’t playing Marshall or Austin Peay.