Inside the stampede that left six injured at Auburn basketball ahead of ESPN's GameDay
Adam Cole- A large crowd of students gathered at Auburn University for ESPN's "College GameDay," leading to a dangerous stampede.
- The university's announcement prohibiting camping and delaying line formation contributed to the chaotic situation.
- Multiple students were injured, with at least one person requiring medical attention.
- Auburn University has since released a new student entry policy for men's basketball games, aiming to prevent similar incidents.
- A large crowd of students rushed a barricade to enter a "College GameDay" event at Auburn University, resulting in several injuries.
- The incident occurred after the university changed its usual camping policy due to extreme weather, leading to confusion and a rushed entry process.
- Auburn officials have reviewed the incident and implemented a new student entry policy for future basketball games.
AUBURN — In the days after the student-gate rush before ESPN's "College GameDay" show at Neville Arena, one of Logan Smith's clearest memories were the screams.
Smith, a fourth-year mechanical engineering student at Auburn University from Hayden, Alabama, was one of many who showed up for ESPN's on-campus airing on Jan. 25. Like the hundreds who arrived at dawn, his goal was to get into GameDay and get a wristband to return for Auburn basketball's top-10 matchup with then-No. 6 Tennessee that evening.
But Smith was one of many caught up in calamity, as several hundred students crashed through barricades and security to be among the first to get into Neville Arena for GameDay. It was a stampede, and it left at least a half-dozen students injured.
Four days prior, Auburn had announced it would not permit camping in advance of any events that weekend, including Auburn basketball's game and ESPN's morning show. In the university's announcement, it said the student line for entry to GameDay would open at 6:30 a.m., half an hour before doors were slated to open.
"When they sent out the email saying that the line's not going to start until 6:30 in the morning, you know, it raises a lot of questions," Smith told the Montgomery Advertiser. "I kept waiting for them to kind of release more details, but they never really did, other than the general, 'It opens at 6:30. You can't be in line before then.' But knowing how passionate our students and fans are, I knew that wasn't going be the case."
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Smith got the same idea as many of his peers. He went to bed early. He got up early. He showed up early – around 3 a.m. – and staked out his opportunity to get into a line that had yet to exist. In its place was a huddled mass, which began to take full shape a couple hours after his arrival. And it reached full velocity soon after, with screams of fear as a soundtrack to Smith's ears.
"This girl is, like, she's screaming in pain, fear – a mixture of everything," Smith said. "I can imagine being on the ground and getting stepped on, and seeing people just stampede over you. She was probably just terrified. You hear the screams, and it just kind of clicks in your head like, 'Oh my gosh, somebody could get really hurt here.'
"It started to become less about, 'How are we going to get up there?' to, 'What are we going to do if something bad happens?'"
In the week after incident, Auburn put out a pair of press releases. And until it released a entirely new student entry plan for men's basketball games Sunday evening, it hadn't commented further.
As of Monday afternoon, two records request from the Advertiser to the university still hadn't received acknowledgement. An email to the Auburn Police Department on the subject of public arrest logs and incident reports has also gone without response. Three emails — one sent to Auburn's Senior Associate Athletic Director for Strategic Communications Kirk Sampson, inquiring about procedures and an interview with a department, and a follow-up; an interview request with the Campus Safety and Security Public Information Officer Ashley Gann; and another requesting to speak with Senior Vice President for Student Affairs, Dr. Bobby Woodard — all received replies.
Requests from the Montgomery Advertiser for comment and interviews were forwarded to the Auburn University's executive director of public affairs and executive communication, Jennifer Adams.
Adams responded to the Advertiser's request to interview Woodard late Monday afternoon with a blanket response, saying: "The newly posted processes and policies for queuing before men’s basketball games will serve as Auburn’s response."
This is a look inside the noise from four different students who were caught up in the pre-GameDay stampede.
3 a.m., Jan. 25
When Smith parked his car outside The Village, he quickly realized he wasn't alone in his idea.
"I ended up overhearing a conversation with one of the security guards about how we were allowed to walk around, but we could not stand in one place, at the end of the line, where the line started at the bottom of the hill," Smith said. "So, then that kind of turned into a lot of people just kind of walking around in that area in circles, basically, is what that turned into. They tried to find a loophole in that."
Another student, who spoke to the Advertiser on the condition of anonymity because of his employment with an on-campus entity, said he arrived around 4 a.m. As he understood it, many students had spent their evening strolling the sidewalk of Thach Concourse to circumvent the no-camping policy.
By the time he arrived, he estimated the crowd to be in the low hundreds, picking up to somewhere between 300 and 400 within the next hour. One student, though, was confident the crowd grew to be much larger at its peak.
Mallee Nichols, a senior apparel design major from Birmingham, Alabama, told the Advertiser that the crowd was closer to four figures, estimating that it reached 3,000.
"People keep putting out this false narrative that everybody got a ticket," Nichols told the Advertiser. "I have multiple friends who didn't get in. Like, all of my friends have multiple friends who didn't get in. There was still a decent amount of people (outside) by the time that they had let everyone in, supposedly. And they let in 1,200 kids. So, there definitely had to have been at least another 1,200 out there."
In terms of that estimate, Smith said "it did get to that," and the anonymous student said, "it probably felt like that."
"My generation didn't grow up with us going out to Black Friday, and, like, camping in lines for Black Friday," he said. "But that's what I imagine it felt like, like, rushing into Walmart at 5 a.m. just to get the best deals."
At 8:39 a.m. Saturday morning, the Auburn men's basketball account on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, posted that "every student who was in line" for GameDay had been admitted and given a wristband. The post did not disclose the total number of students admitted.
5 a.m.
When on-site security personnel began to move students forward, it cleared a barricade toward the end of Thach Concourse, near the intersection of West Thach Avenue and Wire Road. The anonymous student said on-site security was moving the mass of students forward in 60-foot increments, with minutes-long pauses between moves.
Near the front of the line, he recalled looking back and thinking, "Holy crap. That's a lot of people. There's nothing good that can come of this."
From his view, he saw approximately six security members on site trying to maintain control, though he was certain there were more. Sammy Lifshen, Nichols' roommate and a senior marketing major from Austin, Texas, estimated that there was approximately one security person for every 30 people.
Lifshen said she and Nichols arrived around 5 a.m. At that same time, Smith said he received a text from a friend who was at a surrounding dorm informing him that the line was beginning to form – an hour-and-a-half before it was expected to.
"You've got the gate where everybody's kind of smushed pretty narrowly, in a somewhat organized crowd of people waiting in front of the gate," Smith said. "But then you've got people that are on the sides, and they're starting to build up on the sides. You know that they're going to try to squeeze in front of the people from the sides. Like, everybody knew that's what was going to happen. But once you're stuck in the middle, there's nothing you can do about it."
Lifshen and Nichols found themselves further up on the concourse, near the outdoor plaza in Oak Residence Hall. Nichols described the initial environment as "chill," but as more people arrived, she compared to a scene from "The Hunger Games," a ceremony referred to in the book as "The Reaping."
"Everybody was screaming," she said. "There was two security guards forming a line, trying not to let people go crazy. And once that happened, we were like, 'Oh no, this is going to be insane.'"
7:30 a.m.
Lifshen and Nichols were separated in the rush, but they reconnected inside Neville Arena, after security personnel saw Lifshen in the aftermath of a trampling.
Lifshen, who posted her injuries to her personal Instagram account, received six stitches after her chin was cut open.
"(I) tripped on something or someone, and like, fully fell, full-speed, on my face," Lifshen said. "And some people tried to bend over and grab me, but they all couldn't stop running, because it was just crazy."
Lifshen saw a set of metal barricades near where she and Nichols loitered going down. She said, with a chuckle, "Oh my God, I cannot step in between like the grates, or I'm literally going to trip and, like, die."
While Lifshen was presumably one of the six minor injures that Auburn reported occurring, Nichols said she saw someone stretchered off into an ambulance, and "their leg was bent really strangely."
In its follow-up statement, the university said it had "no verifiable reports of any broken bones resulting from Saturday’s incident at Neville Arena," and those aware of a student who suffered a serious injury were encouraged to reach out to Dr. Bobby Woodard, AU's senior vice president of student affairs.
From where Smith was in the mass, movement toward Neville began as an "inching," he said. "But everybody's shoving, you're leaning, everybody's shoving you to the left, and everybody's shoving to the right and you're just going with the wave at that point. Like there's nothing you can do."
When the barricades broke, Smith's first sign was those around him breaking into a sprint.
"I literally said out loud, 'There's no way that like we're doing this,'" he said. "'There's no way this is happening. There's no way this is what we're doing. This is not happening right now.'"
Smith, who was in the middle of the mass, felt the majority of people push toward the right, near where the barricade had collapsed. But by this point, he wasn't concerned with getting into the arena. He was one among multiple trying to help those on the ground, he said.
"You've got people that are trying to stop, but you've got some people in the back that don't know what's going on or don't care what's going on," he said.
Smith's efforts to push back and talk down his passersby at the very least diverted gate-rushers away from those on the ground, he said. But "you ended up just getting swept up in the crowd."
And once it was over? "You look up and you look behind you, and you're like dang-near at the back of the line," he said. "When you were here at 3 o'clock in the morning – and dang-near at the front of the line when it started."
Eventually, Smith got inside the arena and received a standing room-only ticket. Both Lifshen and Nichols each received a wristband to the game once inside Neville, and the case was the same for the anonymous student, who didn't get into the arena until an hour after gates opened.
Neither Nichols, Smith, nor the anonymous student said they suffered any injuries.
While Nichols drove Lifshen to East Alabama Medical Center, both Smith and the anonymous student stuck around for GameDay. They were in agreement that what transpired had dampened the moment.
"It was definitely the most, 'I don't really want to be here' moment that I've felt at GameDay before," Smith said.
10:20 a.m.
REQUIRED READING:Auburn University issues statement after student-gate rush ahead of ESPN's 'College GameDay'
Hours removed from the morning's chaos, and in the midst of ESPN's GameDay show, Auburn put out an official release on the day's events, saying: "Extreme weather conditions during the course of the week forced Auburn to make the difficult decision to disallow the traditional premier match-up camp out which occurs in Jungle Village, and allows students to line up gradually over a period of time.
"As temperatures deemed a camp out to be unsafe, the student line was announced to open at 6:30 a.m., prior to doors opening for students and fans at 7 a.m.
"For a brief moment upon line opening, a group of students rushed around the side of security, working personnel and students who had staged near the barricade entry. Those students began jumping barricades to gain entry which impacted the students trying to enter the barricades in an orderly fashion.
"All students in line in advance of this morning’s live broadcast – including students who walked up after the initial line was cleared – were admitted to the arena and provided with a wristband for entry to tonight’s game.
"On site medical staff reported a few minor injuries which were addressed locally by EMS.
"Auburn is reviewing feedback and video footage from the line to develop plans for future games to ensure student safety."
6 p.m
No. 1 Auburn and then-No. 6 Tennessee tip off for what turned into a defensive slugfest, and an eventual 53-51 victory for the Tigers.
'I KNEW IT WAS GOOD':Inside final seconds of Auburn basketball's win over No. 6 Tennessee
According to the box score, the official attendance was 9,121 – Neville Arena's capacity.
9 p.m., Jan. 27
REQUIRED READING:AU addresses failures that led to student injuries ahead ESPN's Auburn basketball show
Two days after GameDay, Auburn released a follow-up statement, which read:
"Background: The extremely low temperatures of last week motivated a deviation from our traditional and tested method of admission to Neville Arena where students queue for admission. As such, students were asked to begin lining up at 6:30 a.m., on Saturday, Jan. 25, for the College Game Day event. The doors opened at 7 a.m. for students and fans to enter Neville Arena.
"When the arena doors opened, security officials led the line of students to the door of the arena. It was at this time that a small group of people leapt over the barricades or knocked over the barricades in an effort to beat the main line of students who were lined up appropriately and in an orderly fashion. It was during this commotion that students, who were following the correct procedures for admittance, were impacted by the rush of students behind them. The entire incident was brief but resulted in a few minor injuries and considerable alarm.
"What Happened: There were six minor injuries reported by on-site medical staff and the injuries were addressed locally by EMS. No student was transported from campus by ambulance to the hospital.
"At this time, we have no verifiable reports of any broken bones resulting from Saturday’s incident at Neville Arena.
"What’s Next: Auburn is reviewing our game day policies and procedures and, with ample student input, will assess the best method for how students should gain admission to future men’s basketball games. The safety of our students, personnel and community members is of utmost importance."
The statement also included an additional paragraph, which said: "If you are aware of a student who suffered a serious injury on Saturday, such as a broken bone, please have them reach out to Dr. Bobby Woodard, the Senior Vice President of Student Affairs. Dr. Woodard can assist the student with any necessary services they may need."
Adams, who provided the Advertiser with the statement the following day, said that paragraph was attached when sent to parents or students who had reached out saying they knew of students with broken bones.
As of Jan. 29, Adams said no claims of broken bones were verified and that no one had reached out to Woodard.
6:36 p.m., Feb. 2
On Sunday evening, Auburn announced a new policy for entrance to men's basketball games, making a sweeping change that would determine every game moving forward as either a "queuing" or "camping" contest, in regards to student entry.
WHAT TO KNOW:AU unveils new procedures for student entry to Auburn basketball games
Both designations will rely heavily on what the university referred to as "quads," siphoning students off into four different sections near Neville Arena and surrounding residence halls.
The GameDay stampede injuries were not mentioned in the release of the new policies, although the Tennessee game and barrier breach were cited.
"I think with every decision that's been made, there are good things and bad things about it," the anonymous student said Sunday. "Honestly, I think there's more good things than bad things, which is exactly what we want to see."
To him, the queuing process is one that will greatly benefit students. But he sees concerns in regard to some of the camping restrictions, most notably that students won't be permitted to have more than four members in a camping group, and that at least 50% of that group should be present within their registered tent.
According to a release, there will be grounds for removal if those requirements aren't met upon a randomized check.
"It makes planning schedules hard, especially during the day," he said. "Like if you have a friend group of four, and you all have classes at the same exact time, you pretty much just have to hope that they don't check tents at that point in time. ... It's also difficult for people with jobs, because jobs take up a lot of time."
But he was also quick to acknowledge that, much like in the case of the stampeding fiasco, there's hardly a perfect solution.
"It wasn't perfect before, because you'd have a group of 12 people, and there'd be one person waiting in line and then those 12 people would show up an hour before the doors open," he said. "You're like, '... I was second in line and now all of a sudden I'm 14th in line.'"
There's blame to go around, something every student quoted in this story acknowledged. There are students who should have acted with better judgement. There is an administration that should have done more to prepare.
But beyond the pointing of fingers, the anonymous student said: "This was just something that was bad. We have to acknowledge it was bad, and then just push forward from there."
Adam Cole is the Auburn athletics beat writer for the Montgomery Advertiser. He can be reached via email at[email protected] or on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter,@colereporter.