LSU beat South Carolina in front of a nonexistent crowd at Tiger Stadium on Saturday night. The fans in Baton Rouge completely abandoned their college football team during a one-score SEC game.
They deserve to be shamed for their mass exodus.
There is no more intimidating fanbase in college football at their loudest and rowdiest so LSU plays almost exclusively at night for that reason. ESPN loves to showcase Death Valley after dark. And yet…
LSU fans left early.
The No. 11-ranked team in the country hosted the Gamecocks for a 6:45 p.m. kickoff at Tiger Stadium. It was at full capacity. 100,000 fans were in the stands as the game got underway.
It did not take long for that to change.
LSU went into the locker room at halftime with a seven-point lead at 10-3. Fans already started to head toward the exits. They did not stick around.
This was the scene with approximately eight minutes left in the third quarter:
If that wasn’t bad enough, it got worse. Students mostly cleared out by the start of the fourth quarter.
1 score game and this is the LSU student section? Poverty fanbase pic.twitter.com/gJqIzmsITH
— Pocket Whipper (@pocketwhipper) October 12, 2025
The rest of the stadium followed suit.
This is LSU tonight. Every school has off games with fans. But you already knew that pic.twitter.com/8qhGqDjfUp
— Ole Miss Rising (@OleVanishing) October 12, 2025
South Carolina trailed LSU by only seven points with seven minutes left in the fourth quarter. This wasn’t a blowout. Rather, the opposite. It was a one-score game against an SEC opponent!
And yet, here is how it looked:
Where did everyone go? More than half of the fans were already on their way back to the couch.
Brian Kelly fatigue is real.
The primary catalyst for this exodus is the traffic leaving the stadium. Fans do not want to get stuck in a parking lot for an hour or longer after the clock hits zero as hundreds if not thousands of cars all try to jam into the same few exits.
LSU needs to figure out a more coherent plan to get its fans home faster. I don’t know if the solution is to hire more traffic control staffers or what. Something needs to be done.
The other piece of the equation is Brian Kelly. Fans in Baton Rouge are starting to sour on their head coach if they are not already there. His team yields a similar result every year. It becomes monotonous. The product on the field is not worth watching. People leave.
With all of that being said, there is no excuse for a top-25 team to have such a pathetic crowd in the third quarter of a one-possession conference game. Especially when the Tigers get almost every night game possible because of their famous college football environment.