Wisconsin Football: Change coming to Camp Randall?

Wisconsin Football has teased upcoming changes to Camp Randall’s student section in a cryptic tweet.

There are few venues in college football that provide a better home-field advantage on game day than Camp Randall does for the Badgers. No matter who Wisconsin is playing, there is never any doubt that the atmosphere at the Camp is going to be electric.

You can largely thank Wisconsin’s students for that. Camp Randall’s student section is notoriously loud and unruly, and it is a definite advantage for the home team.

That being said, there’s always room for improvement, right?

On Monday, the Wisconsin Athletic Department’s Twitter account posted a vague tweet that seems to hint at changes that will be made to the student section. Or perhaps we should now call it “Area RED”?

While the Badger fan base remains in the dark regarding the specifics, it appears as though some members of the team may have some insight into what’s coming. All-Americans T.J. Edwards and Jonathan Taylor have joined in on the fun.

What could athletic director Barry Alvarez and company have up their sleeves? Allow me to speculate.

In recent years, the Wisconsin Athletic Department has struggled mightily to get the student section filled up by the time of kickoff. For the vast majority of games, it does eventually get full, but that often does not happen until the first quarter is well underway.

Many Badger fans have taken issue with this and grumble about what they perceive as a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the students. While the rest of the stadium is a sea of red well before the game starts, there tends to be one section that appears glaringly whitish-gray in contrast, and that is due to the empty bleachers in the student section’s end zone.

This situation is the result of a number of factors, namely a lack of incentives for students to arrive early, as well as the somewhat inefficient methods currently employed by stadium staff to get them organized and into their seats.

So, how could this be tied to Area RED?

My first guess didn’t exactly require much thought: maybe they are going to paint the bleachers in the student section red. That way, the emptiness of the area will not be as apparent when the students are not on time. Or maybe Under Armour will provide t-shirts or some other gear to a select number of students as an incentive for them to arrive earlier than their peers.

However, I have a sense there is more to Area RED than that. The amount of hype coming from the players leads me to believe that whatever changes are being made could be much more exciting. Perhaps they are going to implement some kind of pregame ritual that students are not going to want to miss, something much like “Jump Around”.

I’m eager to see whatever they have come up with when the Badgers square off against Western Kentucky in a couple weeks.