Last night was the first home game I've attended this year. Graduated in 86, have been made it back to Lane at least once every season since, except the Covid year. Have also been to many other ACC, SEC, and NFL stadiums for various games. I don't ever think I've attended a game where the in-stadium environment was less oriented toward the actual football game taking place. I had read many posts on this board, earlier in the year, talking about the increase in both the frequency and volume of the canned music played during the game. Those posts didn't prepare me for the actual reality that hip-hop and pop music is blared after EVERY FREAKING PLAY. Even when VT has the ball. It is incredibly annoying. The MV's have been relegated to either a pregame or halftime show, and maybe one or two quick bursts of music during the game. The days of the band getting the crowd fired up and cheering appear to be long gone. The days when Lane was incredibly loud when the opponent had the ball, and quiet when VT had the ball, are definitely long gone. Lane is still loud, but now it's loud from ear-splitting prerecorded music being pumped out over a bad PA system. I'm a live music fan and attended two rock concerts within the last 3 weeks, standing directly in front of the stage speaker stack for one of them. My ears weren't ringing after either of those compared to how they felt after being assaulted repeatedly on Thursday night. The video board has also become very detached from the game itself. While it still shows replays, during dead ball situations or timeouts, gone are the days of showing highlights from previous games, scores from other games, or things I used to really enjoy like "this day in VT history". Instead, we are treated to endless shots of random crowd members mugging for the camera, dancing for the camera, singing to the camera, playing video games, eating pizza, etc. Anything to get on camera. None of which has anything at all to do with the game, getting people engaged in the game, firing up crowd support to help the home team win the game. It's just a reflection of the "look at me" social media culture that seems to infest every single aspect of our society. I guess the AD "braintrust" thinks that they need to appeal to the part of our culture that must be entertained every 30 seconds by some new snippet of music, or a TikTok video, or text message. I guess they think that segment of society would rather know whether a football player prefers Beyonce or Rihanna, rather than showing video highlights of that football player making football plays. They may be right, there probably is a segment of the stadium population that loves all that stuff. The problem as I see it is that fan segment is probably closely aligned to the segment that tends to leave after the first half, regardless of score, and treats a football game as a social event rather than an athletic event. But I don't believe that the majority of paying customers want that type of experience. Maybe I'm totally off base, but I still believe that most people want to go to a football game for football, want to hear (and make) crowd noise rather than recorded noise, want to see highlights and replays on the video board rather than people dancing in the stands with Zoom filters superimposed on their heads. Curious to know what others think. I never thought I'd get to the point where I enjoyed watching VT games more on TV than I did being in the stadium, but that day may have arrived.