This past weekend, when LSU visited Texas, LSU university and team officials claimed that the Tigers had an awful experience at Texas Memorial Stadium. LSU reportedly made it public that the visiting locker room they were using lacked air-conditioning, but Texas denied the accusation.
On Tuesday, Georgia head coach Kirby Smart was told of the incident and didn’t seem surprised.
“Some of the SEC facilities on the road, y’all should go around and do a story on, because there’s not very good locker rooms in the SEC on the road,” Smart said. “They’re mostly the old ’60s and ’70s locker rooms from stadium to stadium.
Smart compared some of the places he’s been in as “dungeons”, and claimed that a lot of schools don’t have high-quality facilities for visiting opponents. He refused to pick on them because he admitted that Georgia’s visiting locker room isn’t the nicest.
Georgia senior defensive tackle Michael Barnett (94) then weighed on the comparison. He used Vanderbilt’s visiting locker as an example.
“Vanderbilt’s was very small, and so imagine this. I mean, how you’re sitting right there with this camera right here, and this camera right there, that’s how lockers are set up,” Barnett said. “You can imagine me standing next to Jordan Davis, and Tyler Clark, and it’s like man, c’mon now, we need room, we’re big boys. And then there’s like a small little bench.”
Like LSU, when Georgia traveled to Nashville two weeks ago the team did have to face some obstacles, but just not necessarily anything to do with the locker room. It was reported that the Bulldogs had to walk two blocks to Vanderbilt Stadium prior to the game, due to an issue on the route they were taking to get there.
Smart knows that dealing with adversity on the road might be unavoidable sometimes, and especially with traveling with over 100 players and personnel. Smart said he doesn’t view the situations he’s been in as unsportsmanlike, but just something that you really can’t do anything about.
“There were a couple of times we got stuck in a roadblock and couldn’t get to the game on buses and thought we were going to have to get out and walk on I-85,” Smart said. “That frustrates you but there’s not a lot you can do. Some things you can control and some you can’t.”
Michael Barnett also knows that life on the road can be tough, and admitted you don’t want your opponent to have an easy time traveling. He said he knows that when Georgia travels that he expects other teams hope they don’t have it easy.
Georgia’s next road contest is Oct. 5 when they travel to Knoxville to take on Tennessee, and Neyland Stadium is historically known to be cramped and now probably starting to collect dust.
Here is the video from Kirby Smart’s post-practice presser on Tuesday evening: