The 12th man effect is real. Whether its Lambeau field for the Packers in the snow, or the Aggies branding their entire student section with that moniker, the fans in the stands have an effect on the visitors. But as it is the case with hosting thousands of people in one place, there are bound to be some edge cases that take things too far.
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Urban Meyer had a legendary coaching tenure, and yet there is one college football program he still won’t want to visit again. It was a hard guess, but when it comes to the LSU Tigers Stadium, Meyer has a particularly bad set of memories.
“It’s awful,” Meyers said on the Triple Option Podcast on August 8. “I remember saying that’s one place I’ll never ever go again. So, I could tell you story after story of things that happened.”
The old head coach immediately started off with a fan interaction with an old lady. “What was the old lady doing?” Rob Stone asked Meyer. “We had eye contact, and it was very clear. ” Welcome to Baton Rouge, you prick,” Meyer said laughingly, answering Stone’s question.
The fan intensity at LSU, and especially Tiger Stadium, is an unrelenting pressure cooker. When Meyer was a head coach, he acknowledged Tiger Stadium as one of the toughest venues in sports. For him, the environment is borderline toxic for opposing teams. While usually the booing is directed towards the player, LSU fans have even targeted Meyer whenever he has been down there.
This was also the era when the annual Florida-LSU rivalry was one of the most brutal fixtures in college football.
One of the many instances he has had in LSU is of an elderly woman flipping him off. In the 2007 matchup when his defending national champion Florida Gators rolled into Baton Rouge, they were welcomed with a hostile environment. As the Florida team buses pulled up to the venue, Meyer looked out the window and noticed an elderly woman navigating the crowd.
“I remember the old lady; she’s in a walker, she’s walking, and as our buses come by, she stops and takes her hands off the walker and just [gives the middle fingers]. The double bird, staring right at me. I was like, ‘What in the h*ll?” Meyer still remembers her face clearly and can even make a sketch of her visage.
This was just the beginning. While walking with his team in a cramped, 10-foot-wide chain-link walkway, he had an encounter with another crazy fan.
A male LSU fan stood right against the fence, screaming and locking eyes with Meyer. As Meyer got closer, he dumped his glass on him. He believed it was just beer and physically went after him. Security intervened and stopped him as the fan disappeared. After reaching the locker room, Meyer realized the fan had actually thrown a cup of urine on him.
Meyer’s Gators lost 28–24 in 2007. In 2009, he got his revenge with a 13–3 victory. But the relentless verbal abuse from the stands has stuck with him permanently.
Meyer is certainly not alone in this. Death Valley has spent decades establishing its reputation as the single most hostile venue in college football for visiting head coaches.
“Three SEC coaches I spoke with who have worked in other leagues say that Tiger Stadium is, by far, the loudest stadium in the country,” said Bruce Feldman of CBS Sports at the time.
As detailed in a retrospective by Sports Illustrated, Nick Saban also had to face the wrath of the fans he had abandoned to go and join their rival Alabama. Upon arriving at Tiger Stadium as the Bama head coach, Saban’s team was subjected to explicit words and expressions from thousands of fans lining the streets.
Saban even recalls how the noise levels prevented his team from snapping the ball near the goal line.
“I mean, I remember when Tua [Tagovailoa] was playing for us and we had a really good team and we got the ball at the beginning of the game and we went right down the field. And we got down there on about the 20-yard line of the student section, we had like four straight false starts,” Saban said to Zach Nagy of SI in an interview taken in 2024. “I mean we couldn’t go on silent; we couldn’t go on clap. We couldn’t get the ball snapped.”
Even the legendary Bear Bryant was affected by playing at Tiger Stadium. “Baton Rouge happens to be the worst place in the world for a visiting team. It’s like being inside a drum,” said the old legend.
As noted in historical accounts featured by LSU Sports, the physical layout of the stadium features exceptionally steep slopes and stands built directly on top of the visiting team’s bench.
The crowd’s suffocating physical proximity made communicating with players nearly impossible and subjected coaches to a non-stop, four-hour barrage of direct, personal insults from just a few feet away.