Tigers Fans Erupt Over Logistics Nightmare

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

From the Principal Toyota Studios, it's Morning in Memphis with Todd Starnes.

Todd Starnes (0:08)

Oh, yes. Well, the good news, ladies and gentlemen, you have a short work week. So hello, welcome to Tuesday here on The Mighty 990 I'm Todd Starnes broadcasting from the Principal Toyota Memphis Studio. It is going to be another hot one. You just heard Laura Huckabee with the forecast. Seventy-six degrees right now. Very tolerable for you folks out doing the morning walk. Maybe you're heading over to your favorite coffee house this morning for an iced coffee or an iced tea. Take your time. Enjoy today. Make sure you crank up the AC. And if you're going to be outside, you got to hydrate. You got to do that. Seventy-six degrees right now at Brancrest Christian School in Eads. We're going to be checking temperatures across the Mid-South throughout the morning here on the show. Well, we have some very special guests coming along as well. There is a great opportunity for you to help our Memphis First Responders. And George Brown from Kroger is going to be joining us in just a little while to explain what our KWAM audience and you guys are the most generous audience in all of Talk Radio here in the Mid-South. George Brown is going to be here to help you to help us understand what we can do. Also, John Covington, the Vice President of the Memphis Police Association, is going to be here as well. He has a new column out today in the Daily Memphian, and we're going to be talking about that. But the one thing that everybody is talking about is what happened over the weekend at the Memphis Tigers big season. Well, it's a home opener, and it was a great night, but there were a lot of challenges. And thousands of you have weighed in on the KWAM social media pages over what happened with the concessions and the logistics. And we just want to hear from you today. What was your experience like attending the newly renovated Liberty Bowl? We can't call it anything other than the Liberty Bowl here on KWAM. So what was your experience like? The good, the bad, and the ugly? Because look, we heard a lot of people say that the renovations were spectacular, beyond spectacular, that they went beyond the expectations. And then whether or not you could get a pronto pop or not determined whether you actually enjoyed the rest of the evening. Because it was brutally hot, and a lot of folks were really frustrated over the lack of the logistics. In some cases, there were people who purchased season tickets. They showed up and they realized their row no longer existed. And many people wondering, okay, what exactly did they pay for it? Now, we have no doubt that today, there are going to be a lot of calls made to the University of Memphis, to ticketing, to the athletic department. Be nice. Be gentle. The folks answering the phones are not responsible for whether or not you got a pronto pup or a seat at the Liberty Bowl. So be patient is what I'm trying to say. And that really is the messaging coming from the University of Memphis. And yesterday, Monday, two days after the event, the University did release a statement. And I thought it was a pretty darn good statement. They admitted that they completely botched this thing. And they're going to figure it out. Look, one of the big challenges, I think, is they got rid of all the volunteers that were doing the concessions. And a lot of that money went to help and went to fund local organizations for kids. And the University decided to go with a professional company. And the professional company just dropped the ball. I mean, there's really no other way to say it. But we want to hear from you this morning. What was your experience like at the game on Saturday? Our telephone number, 901-260-5926.

Again, that's 901-260-5926.

We have the University's statement over on kwhamradio.com. And I would encourage you to head over to our website. I'm telling you, I have never seen so many people weighing in on a story.

It's really quite remarkable. But Ed Scott, who is the Athletic Director, said, Look, we're going to get to the bottom of this. We're going to make sure this does not happen again. And again, the Tigers on the road, a Boise State this coming weekend. And we will see that gives them about two weeks to get everything else in working order. And look, it's a brand new stadium. What are you going to do? But a lot of this stuff could have been easily preventable. The parking situation, the long lines getting into the stadium. And look, that's a good problem to have. I mean, you would rather have people waiting in long lines than the way it's been in the past where folks just walk up and you've got a nearly empty stadium there. Nobody wants to see that. But anyway, Scott said, I want to read this to you. He said, we heard your concerns about parking, stadium entry, concession lines and other aspects of the game day experience. And we take that feedback seriously. He said that and he said he used the word they fell short. And that's a look. That's a fair assessment assessment here. He says, we recognize that our first home game fell short of that standard in several important areas. We heard your concerns about parking, stadium entry, concession lines and other aspects of the game day experience. And we take that feedback seriously. Now, for whatever it's worth, as soon as, and I monitor a lot of our social media pages. And as soon as I noticed an influx of people, we were getting messages from people. And I immediately reached out to the university and said, hey guys, we're getting these messages as something going on. Can we convey something to the public here? Because that's, we want to be good partners. Problem is Memphis Tigers, they don't want to be partners with anybody. And to, as a matter of fact, as of, well, now, we have yet to hear from the university. We have yet to hear any sort of a, and again, we were trying to be somewhat helpful to them by conveying that information to some pretty upset folks on Saturday afternoon.