Jaguars’ Gameday Experience Leaves Pretty Much Everything to be Desired
The Jaguars game against the Kansas City Chiefs was a hellscape straight out of the Divine Comedy.
Don’t get me wrong; I love football and have much love for my home team, the Jags. In 10 years as a season ticketholder, I’ve missed one regular season game. I am the NFL’s ideal fan of the 21st century: a bougie, female, millennial football lover.
What I saw on Sunday at TIAA Bank Field was a continuation of a trend that has dominated the last decade of my fan experience: an organization more concerned with profits, the illusion of security and flashy ‘gameday experience’ coverage than it is with improving anything for the actual, everyday fan. Over the years, the NFL and their accomplices, the Jaguars and the City of Jacksonville, have made thousands of fans like me wait in longer lines, comply with a dizzying, ever-changing set of seemingly arbitrary rules, all while stripping us of amenities and respect that people who spend thousands of dollars and hours supporting a team probably deserve.
It was opening day and replete with the excitement of a fresh season with a(nother) new quarterback. Last season was a bitter pill, yet, as ever, we hoped that this year would be different. It was hot, even by Florida standards, where sweaty is a state of being, so we loaded up on sunblock and water before trekking to the stadium.
We’ve always parked on Franklin Street in the part of Eastside that the gentrification crowd happily hasn’t discovered. Like most in this area, the lot is owned by a family who makes a business of gameday. The food is good, fellowship better and porta potty always sparkling clean.
Over the years, the city has made the journey from Franklin Street to TIAA Bank Field ever more fraught with danger. Years past, it closed the lane that fans use to ingress and egress the game. A few years ago, it stopped closing the lane as we walked to the game; now it doesn’t close it at all. It also inexplicably drilled steel guardrail into the narrow section of not-quite-a-sidewalk on the MLK Expressway overpass. This has resulted in thousands of fans walking to the stadium with cars whizzing literally inches from us. The city doesn’t even station an officer to stop traffic for pedestrians crossing the street anymore.
Thus, we have little choice but to take our lives in our hands as we frogger to the game. It honestly feels like they’re trying to force people to tailgate elsewhere, and to force the Eastside families and quite a few churches out of gameday business.
Miraculously, we Eastside tailgaters reached the gate without becoming roadkill under the city’s ‘y’all don’t exist’ safety plan.
Then we waited.
And we waited.
For 30 boiling minutes, the line was basically a group of people standing still. We weren’t 25 feet from the gate, yet a woman next to us said that she’d been waiting an hour. It was already nearly 100 degrees. We never did figure out what the holdup was, but as best I could tell, it had something to do with non-compliant bags. After years of the NFL requiring increasingly tiny, tiny bags to, it says, “enhance public safety and improve stadium access for fans,” this year I finally gave into the clear bag. With my tampons, cash, sunblock, and single bottle of water the Jaguars generously decreed we could bring in just this once (presumably in the hopes that no one died of heat stroke) on display in the hideous bag that gives the illusion of security, I sweated and stifled in the Florida sun.
Finally, the logjam cleared and the herd began our slow march towards the gate. I removed my hat and sunglasses, opened my bag for a confounding poke by security, and proceeded to the ticket check.
My phone wouldn’t pull up the ticket.
For years, the day our season tickets came in the mail was glitter-sprinkled with magic. Like Jimmy Fallon in Fever Pitch, I oft wanted to hug the mail carrier who delivered another chance of redemption and triumph.
Now I have to download my tickets from an app they force us to use for the privilege of spending thousands of dollars at the stadium every year. And forget screenshotting them like we’ve done in the last few years; this year the app uploads a new QED code every few seconds, so you gotta do that shit right before they scan it. I assume and hope this is great for minimizing counterfeiting, if that’s even a thing, but for a fan it absolutely sucks. Especially when your phone, after stewing in the greenhouse effect of a clear bag for an hour, won’t work.
And trust that I have never, ever wanted to hug the app.
Happily, my husband’s phone wasn’t similarly fubarred, so he downloaded both, the attendant scanned, and in we went.
We’d started our half-mile journey 45 minutes before kickoff. By then, they were playing the national anthem. I set off for beers and he went down to our seats. Luckily, I’d learned in the preseason that the only place you can find good beer other than Duke’s Brown Ale outside the club and box seats is on the ground level in the Daily’s Place pseudo gas station, so I didn’t waste precious time questing for an IPA.
Apparently the Jaguars are committed to making the gameday experience as unbearably irritating as possible, because after you’ve waited in the line at the gate and been searched and scanned and otherwise inconvenienced, you have to again show your ticket to get to your section. In 10 years, I’ve yet to see a ‘this is my seat’ dispute require staff intervention, but it’s important enough to the Jags to avoid this fictitious situation that I have to put my sundries on the ground, dig my phone out of the clear bag inferno and pull my ticket up yet again.
This would work just fine, annoying, but fine, if your phone wasn’t malfunctioning due to unbearable, predictable heat. After several minutes and ‘something went wrong’ notifications, I called my husband for an assist.
So great. Game time. It was five minutes into the first quarter and the Jags were somehow already down 7–0. No big deal, I’ve seen worse in 10 seasons. I settled into my seat and tried to get into the game.
I could say that it was kinda hot on the field. I could also say that Antonio Brown kinda wants to get paid. Or that water is kinda wet.
The truth is you could’ve fried a steak on my thighs. Even with every bit of my skin covered with hat, scarf, dress and sunblock on the few exposed slivers, it felt like the sun was penetrating my very being.
Still, I was super excited to see our new “franchise quarterback” Nick Foles. I’d like to say I’m surprised that he broke his clavicle in the first quarter, a serious enough injury that it will require surgery, but I’m a Jaguars fan. So I’m disappointed, and sad for the guy and the team, but not surprised that his season, and likely ours, was over minutes into the first game.
I lasted about 15 minutes of football, 45 minutes regular time, before I had to escape. Much is made of the fact that the stadium includes a pool. I’ve seen that pool in gameday coverage; it looks very refreshing. You know what would be more refreshing for us plebes in the not-that-cheap seats? A team that gives a rip for the vast majority of fans who can’t afford to dip a toe into those sparkling, hyper-chlorinated (one hopes) waters.
I’d heard that the game was being projected in the Daily’s Place amphitheater that, for some reason, the city gave Jaguars billionaire owner Shad Khan a bucket of money to construct. Much as I’ve railed against corporate welfare, and as much as I, a person with eyes, view the amphitheater as the boxy, concrete ocular assault that it is, as I stumbled into the merciful shade, sunblind and sweating like a Trump on the witness stand, it selfishly felt worth every penny they took from the surrounding neighborhoods to benefit Khan’s bottom line.
Daily’s Place might not be air-conditioned, or particularly comfortable, yet there I found thousands of TIAA Bank refugees taking blessed respite from the sun to watch the game on a buggy projector without the benefit of sound or of having the score or the time displayed. Of course, what does time matter when you’re getting creamed?
Still, eventually, I gave up on the no-sound, no-score, no-time broadcast and decamped to my seat. Holy mother of god, what a nightmare. It wasn’t (just) the heat; it was the awful football. Hard to believe that defense was elite two seasons ago. Now it seems like they haven’t met a tackle they wouldn’t glory in missing. You might think that the weather would work in our favor against a team from a more temperate climate. You’d be wrong.
Year ago, I would’ve distracted myself from the slaughter by getting something to eat, but the Jaguars have made it their mission to eradicate the stadium of any food that a person who isn’t bulking up for a fight would want. Grease, grease, more grease, plus all the carbs, is their food mantra. Which makes some sense in those mythical cold-weather stadiums, but it’s confounding in a dish cooking sixty thousand people in the unmerciful Florida sun in 100-degree heat.
Finally, it was over. Not the game, but our willingness to endure it any longer.
We left the stadium triumphant. There were 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter, the Jaguars were losing badly and would clearly not attempt a comeback as per usual. Yet we’d bested our greatest foe: heat stroke. Now all we had to do was frogger traffic back to Eastside, and to the car, where beautiful, merciful air-conditioning awaited.
And no one asked us to re-download our ticket for that.
Correction: This article previously stated that Franklin Street is in Springfield.