Where did Kyle Field get the name "Hate Barn"?

In 2011, several months before this site went live, Spencer Hall wrote this send-off to one of college football's finest rivalries. In it, he unwittingly coined a phrase that we'd soon adopt wholeheartedly.

In case you were confused, there it is on the side of the stadium: KYLE FIELD. These pants are not fancy: the lettering is a plain and stark as a lot of the buildings on campus, and as basic as the rolling, ranchy landscape.  An SEC fan who came to a game at Kyle Field said, "Yeah, there's really not much there. Just a warning." This is Texas. You should expect and desire large amounts of nothing offset by things of great size and excess. Turn the right way on campus, and you could hunt deer just adjacent to a field of horses. Turn the other, and there is a concrete hate barn so loud the crowd once received a flag for delay of game.

It was an apt moniker right from the start, and it appealed to a lot of us because it evoked one of the biggest themes of the rivalry: the small town against the big city. Simplicity vs. the ornate. Kyle Field as just a severe, no-frills football building and not a beautiful cathedral, and we loved it. By the time GBH launched it had already been floating around SB Nation terminology for a while so it was a no-brainer that we'd adopt it enthusiastically.

In early September of 2012, we hosted GameDay as we took on the Florida Gators. cuppycup had industriously ordered two very nice banners and early on that Saturday morning Lucas Jackson and I joined him to affix them to PVC pipes and otherwise assemble them, and we ended up getting some pretty good air time. The phrase sort of grew quickly and became one of the site's first catchphrases or memes or whatever the kids call 'em nowadays.

(Thanks to James for snagging these images off his TV that day!)

One of these banners also made it onto Shutdown Fullback not long after. That's Spencer Hall throwing the football.

A few months later we worked the phrase into our "God Made a Farmer" video in February of 2013, a play on the Paul Harvey-narrated Superbowl commercial. It even included a send-off to the beloved urinal troughs in the mens' rooms.

Someone who can bevel a T with a pocketknife, and raise a hate barn out of piss stained concrete." So God made a farmer.

After that, it wasn't even a novelty anymore. The wild success of the 2012 season and it's subsequent use during it had made it seem like it had been around for much longer. No one really thought twice about using it, and in fact people started using it less and less.

Now it's reached the phase of the Internet terminology life cycle where people start to wonder where it came from and say things like "hurr that's stupid". Well, opinions vary, but I think the name is still appropriate; even moreso with the renovations. It may not be a plain, blocky, concrete monstrosity anymore, but "Hate Barn" is a reminder of that past: when all we needed was a big cement tackle box full of wild screaming students and former students to intimidate anyone who dared step foot inside.