Alabama athletics director Greg Byrne isn’t quite getting his wish. The SEC did not change the rules so that a field or court storming after a win results in a forfeit by the home team.

However, the league did make its fines for such stormings more punitive. According to commissioner Greg Sankey, all competition area entry penalties will now be $500,000.

Speaking to the reporters at the conclusion of the league’s spring meetings in Florida, Sankey said the league had reviewed data on the frequency of field and court storming.

“It has increased in the last three years,” Sankey said. “From the beginning of our policy of 2005, to about 2021, it was pretty steady. I don’t know if it’s post-COViD, or what it is, it has increased. That provoked a meaningful conversation about policy change.

Previously, a school’s first offense would cost it $100,000. A second would mean a $250,000, and all subsequent violations were $500,000 each.

According to Sankey, making the fines more uniform made sense.

“If you’re the one getting rushed, it doesn’t feel good,” Sankey said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time there, it might be your sixth time in a row.”

The last time a team beat Alabama in its home stadium and did not rush the field was in 2010, at LSU. Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Oklahoma fans all stormed their fields after beating the Crimson Tide in 2024.

Byrne had called for a far stricter ban through the years,

“Kids aren’t going to be in the stands saying, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do this because the school is gonna get fined $200,000,” Byrne said in February of 2024. “That doesn’t enter their mindset. But if they knew the game that they just had been a part of, celebrated a great win that led to that, if they knew that they were going to lose that game immediately, that would stop them.”

The new rule does come with a caveat. If a fan base allows time for the visiting team and the game officials to leave the field or court before the storming begins, the school will not be fined.

“There’s no interaction, period, between the visiting team and fans,” Sankey said. “Is there discretion? Sure, there’s discretion, but we built in some criteria to establish the expectation. A big part of which is, don’t mess with the visiting team.”

The fines will continue to go to the visiting school for SEC conference games. In non-conference matchups, the penalties stay the same, but will go to the league’s postgraduate scholarship fund.