FanPost

Time to fix Tailgating and Attendance at UT

Like many of you, I have sat in a half empty DKR 5 minutes before kick off wondering where everyone is and especially the students. The answer is that they are probably somewhere on the mile plus walk from West Campus to the Stadium that on game day takes a little over 30 minutes. I know the map says 23 minutes but google maps doesn’t have a feature for walking with a group of 30 people who have been drinking for 4 hours.

Screen Shot 2014-05-20 at 11.11.37 AM

The walk is far from ideal but the majority of the students tailgate in West Campus, either at Fraternity houses or at places like Cain & Abel’s, because there is no other place for them to tailgate where there will be as many students together as in West Campus. And even the places like the Bob Bullock lot or the park by the tennis courts are still close to a mile walk to DKR and a couple of miles from where most of them live. These locations are ok for the alumni because they drive to the games for the most part, but for those of you who have been to places like The Grove at Ole Miss or Auburn or even The Boulevard at SMU you know that places like the Bullock lot or the tennis courts or various lots and other places scattered around by Erwin Center are still far from ideal.

Screen Shot 2014-05-20 at 11.20.22 AM

There is no reason that Texas cannot have a similar scene to those other places, feel free to insert your preferred Walter Cronkite or DeLoss quote, but we have to change where we do it. I propose the East Campus Mall and Speedway where it runs through campus from Gregory to the Engineering school. We could put Alumni and ticket holders on the mall starting from the fountain between the Geology School and the Student Activities Center and have them go all the way up to the plaza on the East Side of the Tower including on Inner Campus Drive. We could have all the Fraternities set up tents in the plaza in front of Gregory and the surrounding area, all the streets in the area will already be closed so there can be tents set up on Speedway as well. This will basically relocate the whole West Campus scene and move it a couple hundred yards from DKR. Or you could even have them all set up in tents in the lawn of the LBJ school and have that whole area of East Campus for the Alumni and others.

Tailgating Zone

Either way it moves both the students and alumni closer to the stadium than the current system, and it creates a scene unlike any that we currently have. I think it greatly improves our gameday experience as well as get people into the stands sooner than the start of the second quarter.

Be excellent to each other.

Trending Discussions