9 Things Alabamians Do on Game Day That Baffle Everyone Else

Alabama won’t know its Saturday kickoff time until the Monday before, sometimes later.

Try planning a wedding around that.

Restaurants shift their hours, families move reunions to a different weekend, and many push Sunday dinner back an hour, all because a television network hadn’t picked a time slot yet.

These are the Alabama game-day habits that make outsiders’ heads spin.

1. Roll Tide Means Everything

Alabamians answer almost any question with the same two words.

Roll tide.

Say it as hello over a Waffle House counter in Huntsville, and the cook behind the grill says it right back before he rings up your order.

It works just as well walking out the door an hour later, standing in for goodbye instead.

A University of Alabama linguistics professor studied the phrase and found Alabamians put it to five different jobs: A greeting, a farewell, a check for fellow fans, a congratulations, and a way to fill a lull in conversation.

Five jobs, two words.

Ask a stranger in Mobile for directions to the interstate and hear “roll tide” back instead of a street name, and you’ll understand why visitors leave confused.

2. Camping the Quad Before Kickoff

Tailgating in Tuscaloosa starts before the last bell rings on Friday.

The University of Alabama opens its Quad to free tailgating on a first-come, first-served basis.

Setup can start on the west side Friday morning for a Saturday game.

No reservations.

Campus RV lots open at 6 p.m. Friday.

Everyone has to clear out by noon Sunday.

A family with a good spot near Gorgas Library has usually been camped there since sundown Friday.

Miss that window, and your family unfolds camp chairs on whatever patch of grass is left, three blocks from the stadium doors.

3. Walking in to Thunderstruck

Alabama’s football team doesn’t sneak into Bryant-Denny Stadium through a side door.

Players and coaches step off the team buses about two hours before kickoff and walk roughly 100 yards through a wall of fans packed along the plaza, a tradition called the Walk of Champions.

The team walks in to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck,” played loud over the stadium’s sound system.

Every time.

The plaza itself dates to 2006, with bronze statues numbered 18 and 92 nodding to 1892, the year the football program started.

Fans who show up two hours early aren’t there for warmups.

They’re there for the walk.

4. Tiger Walk Down Donahue Drive

Auburn runs its own version 160 miles east, and it started smaller than anyone expected.

In the 1960s, a handful of kids would walk up the street to greet the team and collect autographs before kickoff.

That handful is now thousands.

Auburn’s players walk from the athletics complex down Donahue Drive to Jordan-Hare Stadium.

Fans line the whole route two hours before the game.

The largest crowd on record lined that street in 1989, when roughly 20,000 fans turned out for Alabama’s first-ever visit to Auburn’s campus.

A stranger who wanders into that crowd looking for a parking spot gets swept into the walk whether they meant to join it or not.

5. An Eagle Opens Kickoff

Before an Auburn game even starts, a live eagle circles Jordan-Hare Stadium.

The bird flies from the back of the end zone toward midfield and lands near the 50-yard line while tens of thousands of fans yell the same call in unison.

War eagle.

The tradition began in 2000, and the very first flight covered 60 yards in just six seconds.

Handlers from Auburn’s raptor center train the eagles for months before the birds ever fly over a packed stadium.

A visitor who has never seen it happen looks up mid-conversation and stops talking entirely.

6. A Chorus the School Banned

Alabama fans stand for one song every home game, and it isn't the fight song.

At the start of the fourth quarter, fans in Bryant-Denny Stadium break into "Dixieland Delight," a 1982 song written by Ronnie Rogers and released by the band Alabama in 1983, never written with football in mind.

Fans shout their own lyrics into the gaps between the real verses, mostly aimed at whichever rival is on the field that day.

The university pulled the song from games in 2015 over how vulgar those added lyrics had gotten.

Three years off.

It came back in 2018 with a campaign asking fans to clean the words up.

The chorus has filled Bryant-Denny Stadium every fourth quarter since.

7. Rammer Jammer Waits for Victory

Alabama saves one cheer for when the outcome is no longer in doubt.

"Rammer Jammer" only rings out once a win is locked in, never earlier.

No exceptions.

The chant borrows its cadence from Ole Miss's "Hotty Toddy," carried over when a band director moved between the two schools decades ago.

Its wording nods to the yellowhammer, Alabama's state bird.

The full line ends the same way no matter the opponent: Swap in whoever just lost, and finish with "Give 'em hell, Alabama."

Hear it too early in a game, and something has already gone very wrong for the other team.

8. Houndstooth as a Family Heirloom

Walk through a tailgate in Tuscaloosa, and houndstooth turns up on hats, dresses, coolers, and dog leashes.

The pattern traces back to one man, former coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, who started wearing a houndstooth fedora paired with a red sport coat on the sideline in the late 1960s.

Not a costume.

Bryant died in 1983.

Alabamians still pass his hats down like jewelry, with more than one family keeping a houndstooth piece set aside just for game days.

A pattern named for a coach nobody under 40 ever watched pace a sideline.

9. Rolling Toomer's Corner

Auburn fans don't celebrate a big win with fireworks.

They throw rolls of toilet paper into the oak trees at the corner of College Street and Magnolia Avenue until the branches disappear under white streamers.

The habit gained steam after a stunning upset over Alabama in 1972, when fans reportedly ran out of ticker tape and grabbed whatever was on hand instead.

It became tradition from there.

An Alabama fan named Harvey Updyke poisoned the two oaks in 2010, then called into a Birmingham radio show in January 2011 and admitted he'd poisoned the oaks out of spite over that same rivalry.