re: I'm curious to know more about the earthquake game...

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WHAT HAPPENED Don Stevenson, a seismologist working for the Louisiana Geological Survey but technically employed by LSU, wasn’t at the game that night. He was at home, less than a mile from LSU’s campus. He didn’t watch the game on TV. He didn’t listen to it on the radio. He did hear a “tremendous roar” come from the direction of the stadium at one point in the evening and later discovered that LSU had won their football game with a last-minute touchdown. epicenter.jpg The following Sunday morning, Stevenson woke up like the rest of the world. I went to church to petition the Lord for understanding, he headed to LSU’s Howe-Russell Geoscience Complex to change the recording charts in the seismic laboratory (they’re changed daily). “While changing the chart on a demonstration instrument that I had installed on the floor of the laboratory, I noticed a relatively large signal from Saturday evening,” Stevenson says. “Upon closer inspection I realized it coincided with the roar I had heard and the winning touchdown from the game the night before.” He labeled the blip and posted the seismogram in his office window where it stayed “for some time” until “I decided to have the LGS Cartography Department dress it up in a frame and add a formal caption so it could be displayed on a more permanent basis.” Anyone up on Earthquake Game lore is likely aware that the “quake” was discovered after the fact, but they’re also likely ignorant as to just how much time passed between the event and hearing about it. How long was it before the story got out? According to Stevenson, “at least a year or two, maybe more.” Although acknowledging that the seismic activity attributed to the football game was, because of his display, quasi-common knowledge around his particular ward of the geology department, Stevenson attributes its public dissemination to an ESPN hype-umentary filmed sometime prior to his leaving LSU in the summer of ’91.[2]

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