President Myles Adams loves reminding you who's in charge.

I hate the man as much as anybody, but he got this one 100% right. North Campus is the most beautiful spot on campus, and is right up there with any place at any university. If people aren’t willing to take care of it, they shouldn’t be allowed to use it. There are plenty of other areas on campus where careless people with no respect for the university, its history, or its tradition can choose to dump their garbage. What happened last season was an embarrassment. If this is what it takes to prevent something like that from happening again, so be it.

… but the pictures that have ubiquitously been spread about the internet were taken after one week, and in my experience, do not represent the average post-gameday experience. It certainly didn’t after the huge deal was made about it last year and the University started passing garbage bags around like they were condoms at Ridgemont High.

When I saw those pictures, I was flabbergasted myself. My wife and I regularly drive on Broad St. past North Campus and the Arch on our way to church on Sunday mornings, and never once have I seen North Campus in the condition in which it was photographed. This means that either: a) that week was a very unusual event, or b) UGA has a hell of a clean-up staff. (I suspect that both a and b are true.)

If North Campus were being destroyed on a weekly basis to the point where historical landmarks were being endangered, I would wholeheartedly agree with your comments, SG Standard. I do not believe this is the case, however. I think the University administration saw one week of incredibly poor behavior and is using it as an excuse to clamp down once again to ensure that fans on a football gameday have as little fun as possible.

I’ve been tailgating on South Campus for a decade and this absolutely will affect us. The jackasses that screwed up North Campus will bring their styrofoam coolers to us and piss on a new part of campus. Adams will eventually enforce these rules campus wide and then we’re all screwed.

I guess Adams, while examining his “666” beauty scar in his scalp this morning, decided he needed to do something devilish. Why couldn’t he issue a warning prior to the season opener, come up with a plan to remind people what was at stake?

Personally, my plan called for a group of paid vigilantes armed with bats and cattle prongs to patrol North Campus and “correct” those who transgress.

Which I actually quite like. In order to enforce his new plan, Adams is going to have to increase the police presence on North Campus. So the logical question seems to me, couldn’t those additional officers simply have arrested/fined/kicked off campus anyone littering or defecating? Clarke County government could use the increase in revenue.

Seems to me the underlying issue is the tradition of rule/law-bending that’s always been associated with game day here in Athens. Ticket scalpers do business openly on every street corner, while 18 year-old Freshmen walk right past cops, carrying a beer in each hand and one in their pocket.
I’m embarassed to admit on the night of the Auburn game here several years ago, I drank way too much and passed in the grass along Lumpkin Street. I woke up surrounded by cops, and of course, since I was underage, panicked. Luckily, they simply watched as I staggered off into the night.
So is it any surprise that people shrug and say, “whatever” when the trash cans start to overflow? Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t a matter of intentional disrespect for the University as much as it is a result of creating a unique atmosphere in which rule-bending/breaking is allowed, which seems to have worked fine ’til now.

It should go without saying that you take away with you what you brought, including empties. This whole idea that it’s the University’s responsibility to clean up after us or even provide extra waste receptacles is ridiculous to me. If you can drag a cooler full of beer cans onto campus, you can drag a cooler full of empty cans away from campus. It’s that simple.

These days, I park downtown and “tailgate” at bars. And vineyarddawg, that wasn’t just a one-game problem. The campus looked disgraceful after each and every home game. It might have been more disgraceful some weeks than others, but there was never a week where I saw what any reasonable person would call an acceptable level of trash. It was “wall-to-wall” every week, and it enraged and embarrassed me every week. And maybe clean-up crews did a great job getting things cleaned up quickly, but to me, that’s not the point. It should never, ever look like that.

If you ask me, the problem is partly that the litterers didn’t have good home training and partly that whatever home training they may have had was compromised by that whole “group mentality” thing — people will do bad things as a member of a group that they would never, ever do as an individual (hazing’s like that, too), because the sense of personal responsibility is diluted by numbers. Still, no excuse.

I’m not so sure that the elaborate tailgaters with tents, generators, and grills were the worst offenders. I get the sense that those people, more often than not, straightened up after themselves. I think the worst of it were the “transient” fan/tailgaters who would wander through to visit with a more established tailgate or just be there. But maybe those people won’t show up in such numbers if the general atmosphere that attracted them is gone.

And it’s fine with me. When I get my pre-game buzz on downtown, it will suit me just fine to wander through North Campus on the way to the stadium and then back again and soak up the beauty that is my University (which I often describe as part arboretum and part museum of 200 years of architectural history). A huge chunk of my game day experience is nostalgia, anyway. I don’t need drunks and trash to f—- that up for me. Well, the drunks are ok, as long as they’re reasonably well-behaved.

and he can shut down the Grove.

The way our fans have treated the campus the last few years has been an absolute joke.

We blame the bums, We blame the wind, We blame others

It is our fault

When I walk to our games, I laugh at how pathetic it is seeing trash EVERYWHERE

1. By displacing kegs, aren’t more bottles/cans, etc going to be present?
2. By displacing grills/cookers/etc…aren’t more disposable food containers going to be present?
3. By eliminating any cooking/prep/storage table over 4’ long, isn’t Adams ecouraging more crap to be on the ground, instead of on, IDK, banquet tables….

That’s just asinine.