Alabama's Bryant Denny Stadium Raises the X Factor With Addition

Larry Burton (Panama City Beach, Fla.) Word from Tuscaloosa this week is that all is going well the stadium expansion and that it is on schedule to be finished by the opening of the fall football season.

This is great news for Alabama fans and it could be bad news for the visitors.

I was standing on the sideline with the Alabama team last year when Tennessee lined up to kick what would have been the game-winning field goal with just seconds remaining. As the Vols came to the line they were facing the student section on two sides and the noise was deafening.

I couldn't yell and be heard to the person right beside me.

As you all know, that kick was blocked.

Can you imagine how loud it will be this year with over 10,000 additional voices yelling and the final end zone all closed up, making this one of the biggest noise bowls in America?

Alabama now may hope to lose every coin toss just so they can choose to have the visitors facing that student section and the noise they generate for the fourth quarter.

Mal Moore can be thanked for many things, but the most lasting, besides the hiring of Nick Saban, will be the expansion of Bryant Denny Stadium to not only be one of the biggest, but one of the best in all of college football.

His tireless efforts in fund raising and his vision of the future allowed this and many more improvements possible during one of the worst financial times in recent history.

This stadium is already a feared destination for visitors, now it could become even more intimidating.

It all begins when the visitors arrive at the stadium. The size of the stadium and the constant sell out crowds are the first thing they'll see, then they go to the Fail room, the name of the visitors' locker room.

It was somewhat strategically named after a benefactor, James M. Fail. Mr. Fail served three years in the U.S. Navy before graduating from Alabama in 1949 and began a successful and wide-ranging career in the financial sector. His current duties include serving as chairman of Stone Holdings, Inc., and Bluebonnet Savings Bank.

When they leave the locker room, they are now surrounded on all sides by a sea of Crimson and a very loud, vocal fan base.

"Our fans are part of the team," said Nick Saban on the subject. "They play a very important part in not just encouraging our own players, but in creating so much crowd noise for the visitors. We love our fans here."

Though Alabama has yet to do crowd noise testing, such as Penn State has done, you might expect it soon during the first few games.

At Penn State, also a stadium of over 100,000 seats, Andrew Barnard was commissioned to record crowd noise using variously placed microphones around the stadium.

According to http://www.physorg.com/news191520294.html, when Penn State is on offense, noise levels inside 107,282-seat Beaver Stadium reached 75 decibels on the field. That's about as loud as a car radio playing at a reasonable volume with the windows rolled up.

But the noise skyrocketed to 110 decibels—50 times as loud—when visiting teams were on offense, drowning out the calls of the quarterback and making last-minute adjustments at the line of scrimmage very difficult.

"For the visiting quarterback that would be like trying to have a conversation while standing next to a giant speaker at a rock concert," said Barnard.

It will be interesting to see what measurements come from the new Bryant Denny Stadium, but for Alabama fans, they are only interested in the results.