Alabama Football: New Tide Loyalty Program is inefficient and dangerous

Alabama football has a new plan to keep students for four quarters. However, it is not worth the results they got after the first game of the season.

There has been an issue for Alabama football in recent years. With the Tide playing teams outside of the Power Five, fan attendance has been relatively low considering how great the team is. The students face the most criticism, with the “play for four, stay for four” mantra being repeated year after year.

Alabama has tried plenty of things to get the students to stay at games. They’re now scheduling more home-and-home games with top teams. They brought back a fan-favorite song that had been banned for multiple seasons. They now have a new idea: the Tide Loyalty Program.

The Tide Loyalty Program is an incentive-based system that decides who gets prioritization for postseason tickets. You can get points for plenty of things, from earning credit hours to attending games. The best way to earn points is to stay for all four quarters of home games. Although this sounds good in theory, it is simply dangerous at practice.

Let me preface this by saying I was in the student section for their first game with the new program. I stayed for all four quarters, just like I did for every home game last year. I understand wanting for students to stay the entire game, but this is not the way for it to work.

This game was against New Mexico State, arguably the worst team Alabama will play this year. When the betting line is listed at over 50 points before kickoff, you’re not expecting a great game. The Alabama heat made this one even worse. With the student section being faced directly in the sun and the temperature getting high in the 90s (feeling like the 100s), can you blame students for wanting to leave?

Nonetheless, many fans persisted. This is what makes it dangerous. There are complementary water stations to keep fans cool, but the lines can take up to thirty minutes, and some stations were completely empty. Other fans waited in line to buy their own water, but these lines take even longer. While these fans are waiting, they are unable to be in stands anyways.

While this was happening, fans were dropping like flies. Dozens of students needed medical attention due to heat exhaustion and dehydration. At times, it felt as if there were too many fans passing out and not enough paramedics to properly take care of them all.

This would all be bad enough if it was in the name for a program to get points, but the app to get the points didn’t even work. It requires students to have their location services on at all times (another thing wrong with the program). Despite this invasion of privacy, the app did not give the points to many of the students. They had to reside to writing their name on a list as they walked out of the stadium.

It might work better in October, but this first week of the Tide Loyalty Program ended with frustrated students sitting by the concession stand waiting for the fourth quarter. It seems simple: fans should be able to leave the game for their own health without being punished by a program that doesn’t even work.

At the end of the day, student attendance was better than the rest of the stands, but they will be the ones criticized for leaving early in a blowout game in dangerous heat. Those who left will also be the ones punished. It’s not right, and it should not continue into next season.