Final Thoughts About Columbia

Super nice and classy fans. A great stadium and a great atmosphere. Their stadium which looks like an upside down spider is interesting. Walking around the outside, it looks puny, but they somehow manage to cram 88,000 into it. Their south endzone has 3 decks that go as high as the west and east. The north endzone has only one deck, but apparently has all their football offices. A guy said they're going to add onto the north just like the south, which this guy says will mean about 14,000 more seats, which will get them close to 100,000. Their crowd is loud -- not quite like ours, but because the stadium's corners have open areas, I think the acoustics probably lose a lot of noise. They have some maniac in the NE corner at ground level by the students who has a mike and tries all game long to get people jacked up. This guy must be related to Crazy George of the old New Orleans "Shoe Town" days, who used to beat drums on TV and then started doing that at Saints games. Several threads have discussed the stadium music, with detractors saying it makes it feel like an NFL stadium. I disagree -- I think it's a perfect fit for high octane Saturday night SEC football. One of the funnier things, though, is that at the beginning of the 4th quarter, their "theme" music to get the crowd going is "Zarathustra" which I think is Wagner. You old farts would recognize it as the theme music from 2001 -- A Space Odyssey. Why they play that shite at a college football game is beyond me. I thought it was hysterical. The "Flying Saucer" definitely was where the LSU crowd hung out -- lots of international beers. They have a contest just like the Chimes where if you sample a set number of beers over a given time, you get on their ring of honor. And the buxom bar maids at the Flying Saucer looked like porn stars wearing school girl clothing. It was outstanding!! One final thought. I did have one pretty drunk LSU dude in my section that started using a few of George Carlin's 7 words you can't say on television. There were kids around, and so I reeled him in and calmed him down. The Cock fans around seemed to appreciate it. He behaved to a reasonable extent the rest of the game. Many of you will disagree, but I think when we go on the road -- particularly when we sit amongst the enemy, because we're sparse and scattered, we have a quasi-duty to be vigilant, and when of our own is about to cross the line, we need to try and reel 'em in. Having said that, I can promise I was screaming my arse off all game for the Tigers -- but in a respectful way. They thought I was nuts when I would bow to the Chinese Bandits after a defensive stand. But we should try and avoid serving as discussion points for them. Overall -- really a great trip -- except for the mother fricking state fair, which reduced available parking by about 75%.