OrwellBama: Alabama Is Tracking Student's Locations During Games To Make Sure They Don't Leave Early

If you were to write a book similar to Portnoy’s Complaint and instead called it Saban’s complaint, it would be 300 pages of Nick Saban discussing how mad he is that students don’t stay for the full game when they are up 234-7 on Southeast West Alabama Purdue University.

He has discussed this multiple times.

2018:

2017:

2013:

After last week’s game, Saban discussed how he was disappointed in the fans that left early when they were up 62-10 on New Mexico State:

And now, it turns out, that Alabama has been tracking fans faces through a face tracking app to see who is and who isn’t leaving games early!!!

SOURCE-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.

Of course, they found a girl from New Jersey to get a quote from. The University of Alabama has turned into The New Jersey of The South.

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.

A government surveillance program didn’t work as they planned? That’s a shame. Realllllll shame.

When George Orwell wrote 1984, I’m sure he didn’t have Nick Saban in mind, but this is reading exactly like a situation out of that book. I don’t think there are any bad intentions out of Alabama tracking their students on Gameday, but instead, are doing it to please Nick Saban. That’s it. Because he’s such a psycho that he thinks the fans are a part of his process.