91 students removed from sold-out Williams-Brice
Forty-five minutes before South Carolina and Georgia were set to kick off, Anna Edwards thought it was fairly quiet. Standing by Gate 25 at Williams-Brice Stadium, USC’s Director of Student Services expected lines to start filling in about an hour before kickoff.
Even with two confiscated CarolinaCards in hand and a line of 40 or so students snaking from the student ticketing box office, things were relatively calm.
But when it was all said and done, more students were ejected from the sold-out Georgia game than any of the season’s prior home games. It was also the most packed Williams-Brice Stadium has been in its seven-decade history, with 85,911 fans in attendance.
Ninety-one students were ejected or arrested, from the game according to Capt. Eric Grabski, a USC police spokesman. The next highest, from the only other night home game, against Alabama at Birmingham, saw 64 ejections.
The students removed from the Georgia game represented a third of the 273 people that were removed from the stadium in all, according to Grabski. Of those, 35 were arrested, but how many of the arrests involved students is not yet clear.
Throughout the stadium, alcohol accounted for the bulk of the ejections, Grabski said. Nearly a third (31 percent) were taken out for trying to sneak drinks in, 19 percent had alcohol inside and 11 percent were cited for drunkenness.
Others were taken out for smoking inside (18 percent), disorderly conduct (17 percent) and wristband issues (18 percent), he said.
“We had arrests, we had ejections,” Grabski said. “Considering all the people we had and all that went on, the weekend went very well.”
In the stadium, police keep an eye out for people in the student section with broken wristbands, Edwards said, since that’s a telltale sign of someone sneaking in. She suggested students put them on properly and check that they fit well, because if they slip off, the students could be out of luck.
Last week, Ticketing also saw issues with students selling their ticket online, but at the stadium, doing so accounted for just a fraction of the total incidents. Only 1 percent of the stadium’s ejections dealt with people who had someone else’s ID, Grabski said.
For the profile of the game and hype surrounding its buildup, though, Edwards still thinks things went smoothly.
But she’s confused, she wrote in an email, as to why so many students didn’t show up — 601 of them, mostly in the student section, failed to scan in. That’s an unusually high number, according to Edwards, both for the season and for the UGA game historically.