Stan's Blog

Random observations...

...from attending Saturday's OU-TCU football game:

* Tailgating needs a new name. It should be called putting up a tent with tables and chairs for about 20 people, breaking out a full bar in which you not only serve cold beers and mixed drinks for the adults but also Shirley Temples and Roy Rogers for the kiddos, plugging in a 40-inch flat screen TV as well as a DirecTV satellite so you can keep up with other games, and providing enough food for an entire fraternity, whether cooked on a full-size grill or paid for with a huge catering bill. Okay, I know "tailgating" is much simpler, but it's not sufficient to describe what I saw.

* Scoreboards have come a long ways. The one atop the south end of OU's Memorial Stadium was incredible. It had to be 50 yards wide, all digital and all HD. It had the capability of showing HD video across the entire 50-yard screen, or it could be divided graphically into three portions with real-time statistics in the first third, live video in the middle third and typical scoreboard information in the final third.

* Texas Christian University fans give Texas and University fans a bad name, much less Christian fans. Hammered drunk. Flipping off the referees. Organized chants of bull poop. And t-shirts claiming "Horny for Life" on the front and "We score more than you do" on the back. Not to mention they whine about officiating as much as their head coach Gary Patterson.

* Life is fragile, yet it's hard to treat it that way in a crowd of 90,000. Upon getting to our seats, an older man seated behind us began to feel ill. As his son tried to help him down the stadium, he collapsed and blacked out cold. It was a scary scene and seemed like an eternity before the paramedics reached him and carted him away on a stretcher. At first, it really looked like he was dying. And oddly there was so many people around that nobody helped. Luckily it appeared that he was going to survive.

* OU has a really good football team. After Saturday's win, the Sooners were rewarded on Sunday with a No. 1 national ranking.

* OU has a really spoiled fan base. An elderly lady sitting behind us - who looked like she's probably had season tickets for about 40 years - was bagging on quarterback Sam Bradford the whole game, saying how disappointed she was in his play this season. He only passed for 400-plus yards and three touchdowns that night, leading his team to a 25-point win over the 24th-ranked team in the country. Yeah, lady, he's just not cutting, is he?!

* Traffic flow heading out of Norman after an OU game is slower than slow. At one point, we were the first car at a stoplight and sat through three successive green lights before being able to cross the street. Even then, we had to block on-coming traffic for about a minute before we could move completely through the intersection. After a 20-minute walk to the car and a 30-minute wait in the parking lot to "let the traffic clear," it took approximately an hour to drive the five miles required to leave the Norman city limits and only 30 minutes to go the remaining 30 miles to my parents' Edmond home.

* Oklahoma is going to have some fun with Kevin Durant as its new NBA star. Durant is a former Texas Longhorn and now the centerpiece for the new Oklahoma City Thunder, which is set to play its first NBA season this fall. Just as our tailgating was winding down, a charter bus came driving down the road just south of the stadium and adjacent to all the partying. It read "OKC THUNDER" on the LED sign in the front window, so I, along with most others, took a hard look into the tinted windows to see if indeed it was the team. As the back of the bus went by, a slender 7-foot tall black man could be seen holding his 'horns' up to the window for all to see. It was Kevin Durant. I, along with most others, quickly corrected him and pointed the horns downward. Gotta love it.

posted by Stan W @ 11:48 PM