Coach Nick Saban gets peeved at students leaving routs early. An app ties sticking around to playoff tickets, but also prompts concern from students and privacy watchdogs.
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Sweat from an afternoon under a unrelenting sun and in stifling 100-degree heat had soaked through parts of Taylor Pell’s fraternity pledge uniform: khaki pants, blue blazer, white shirt and crimson tie.
But he was embracing the grind.
“Games like this is when it matters,” said Pell, a sophomore from Huntsville, Ala., standing in the largely vacant south end zone bleachers in the fourth quarter of Alabama’s 62-10 shellacking of New Mexico State, its first home game of the season.
Pell’s approach would have drawn a nod of approval from the famously hard-to-please Nick Saban, who may well have been more proud of the fan than some of his backups on Saturday.
Saban, the Alabama football coach, has long been peeved that the student section at Bryant-Denny Stadium empties early. So this season, the university is rewarding students who attend games — and stay until the fourth quarter — with an alluring prize: improved access to tickets to the SEC championship game and to the College Football Playoff semifinals and championship game, which Alabama is trying to reach for the fifth consecutive season.
But to do this, Alabama is taking an extraordinary, Orwellian step: using location-tracking technology from students’ phones to see who skips out and who stays.
“It’s kind of like Big Brother,” said Allison Isidore, a graduate student in religious studies from Montclair, N.J.
It also seems inevitable in an age when tech behemoths like Facebook, Google and Amazon harvest data from phones, knowing where users walk, what they watch and how they shop. Alabama isn’t the only college tapping into student data; the University of North Carolina uses location-tracking technology to see whether its football players and other athletes are in class.
Greg Byrne, Alabama’s athletic director, said privacy concerns rarely came up when the program was being discussed with other departments and student groups. Students who download the Tide Loyalty Points app will be tracked only inside the stadium, he said, and they can close the app — or delete it — once they leave the stadium. “If anybody has a phone, unless you’re in airplane mode or have it off, the cellular companies know where you are,” he said.
But Adam Schwartz, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog, said it was “very alarming” that a public university — an arm of the government — was tracking its students’ whereabouts.
“Why should packing the stadium in the fourth quarter be the last time the government wants to know where students are?” Schwartz said, adding that it was “inappropriate” to offer an incentive for students to give up their privacy. “A public university is a teacher, telling students what is proper in a democratic society.”
The creator of the app, FanMaker, runs apps for 40 colleges, including Clemson, Louisiana State and Southern California, which typically reward fans with gifts like T-shirts. The app it created for Alabama is the only one that tracks the locations of its students. That Alabama would want it is an example of how even a powerhouse program like the Crimson Tide is not sheltered from college football’s decline in attendance, which sank to a 22-year low last season.
The Tide Loyalty Points program works like this: Students, who typically pay about $10 for home tickets, download the app and earn 100 points for attending a home game and an additional 250 for staying until the fourth quarter. Those points augment ones they garner mostly from progress they have made toward their degrees — 100 points per credit hour. (A regular load would be 15 credits per semester, or 1,500 points.)
The rollout during Alabama’s home opener did not go very well.
The stadium’s network servers were overwhelmed by the number of fans in the student section, which seats 17,000 — slightly more than half the student body. That meant that many students were unable to open their apps, leading to long lines at several help kiosks and students taking photos with the scoreboard in the background to prove they had stayed.
“It’s like Wheel of Fortune,” said Giuseppe Rallo, a senior from LaGrange, Ill., displaying the spinning icon on his phone, signifying that his app was not loading.
And the carrot of prized tickets had only a marginal influence on students staying in their seats, as the heat sent dozens to find shelter in the concourses and thousands heading to the exit before halftime, when Alabama led, 38-0. So many students were using fans that the student section looked like Aspen leaves rustling in the wind.
“I think it’s stupid,” said Mitchell Slifka, a junior from Canton, Ohio. “It’s 100 degrees and, personally, I don’t think it’s safe. I’m not sticking around just to get loyalty points.”
By Tuesday night, Alabama had made several changes. FanMaker plans to boost the server capacity tenfold for the next home game, Sept. 21 against Southern Mississippi. Any students who swiped their student card to enter the stadium against New Mexico State would get credit (350 points) for staying until the fourth quarter. And if unsafe weather conditions are forecast, or extended interruptions occur, students who show up will get full credit.
If there was somebody who was not ready to cut the students some slack, it was Saban, who has criticized them over the years for leaving early, including last season after a blowout of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He wants the student section — and the rest of the stadium — full and vibrant to impress the recruits who fuel his program’s championship ambitions.
And if it’s over 100 degrees — a medic said people were “dropping like flies” and a graduate student, Morgan Frick, lamented that her now-frizzy hair “was straight when I got here” — and the game is suspenseful for only as long as it took Henry Ruggs III to bolt 75 yards for a touchdown on the first play, well. …
“Everybody wants to be the beast, but they don’t want to do what the beast do,” Saban said afterward. “So everybody’s got to make a sacrifice. I mean, you want to be the lion?”
He was just getting warmed up.
“Everybody’s got to do something,” he continued. “Everybody wants to be No. 1. If I asked that whole student section, ‘All right, you want to be No. 1?’ Nobody would put their hand up and say, ‘I want to be No. 4.’ They’d all say we want to be No. 1. But are they willing to do everything to be No. 1? That’s another question. Ask them that. I don’t know the answer.”
Kyle Wolf, a senior finance major from Philadelphia, said Alabama fans certainly want to win and he understands how a vibrant atmosphere can spur a team. But he said Saban’s frustration was misdirected.
“You can’t tell me that the team needs me out there supporting them when they’re absolutely destroying players that have no right to be on the same field as them,” said Wolf, who has not seen a home game closer than 14 points in his four years.
The students themselves had no shortage of proposed solutions.
“Sell beer; that would keep us here,” said Harrison Powell, a sophomore engineering major from Naples, Fla.
“Don’t schedule cupcakes,” said Garrett Foster, a senior management major from Birmingham, referring to Alabama’s ritually soft nonconference home schedule, which this year includes Western Carolina, Southern Mississippi and New Mexico State. (Byrne has set about beefing it up, scheduling home-and-home series with Texas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Notre Dame, but those don’t start until 2022.)
In the meantime, there is also time for students to solve their own problems, which is, after all, the point of going to college. An Alabama official figured it would not be long before pledges are conscripted to hold caches of phones until the fourth quarter so their fraternity brothers could leave early.
“Without a doubt,” said Wolf, the student from Philadelphia. “I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s the first game. There will be workarounds for sure.”
As for whether the app, with its privacy concerns, early bugs and potential loopholes, will do its job well enough to please Saban was not a subject he was willing to entertain as the sun began to set on Saturday. He was looking ahead to the next opponent: South Carolina.