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More comments on MSU Football

[Today’s run: 7×400 with walk backs]

More comments on the football game on Saturday:

Some of the young women dressed up like they were going to a dance or a ball.  Pretty fancy.  The guys not so much.

Between the crowd and the field there is a brick wall, a hedge, and a metal fence.  There are fewer security guys than what I remember them having at Colorado State (for the few games I worked security…)

Auburn team colors are orange and something.  The orange looks much livelier in the stands than MSU’s maroon and white.

The MSU fans, during a lull in the game, have a cheering contest between east and west stands.  One yell’s MAROON the other yells WHITE.  They do this back and forth until they get tired.

MSU’s fans traditionally bring cowbells to the game.  The SEC was going to ban them but now they are allowed during certain portions of the game.  The big scoreboard has a thing which tells when it is OK and when not.  99.9% of the people abide by the rule (my estimate) at any given time. (They showed the “need more cowbell” clip from the old Saturday Night Live skit up on the big screen at the start of the game.  Christopher Walken probably doesn’t know he is famous in Starkville.)

The big scoreboard did not have anything to show ball possession, that I could tell anyway.

Besides the big scoreboard there are also fancy display boards the full length of the skybox deck.  Getting ready for a kickoff, between the big board and the skybox edging boards flashing and all of the people shouting and ringing their cowbells… it gets a bit intense.

They set off some small fireworks every time MSU scores a touchdown.

The fans cheer for defensive plays louder than for offensive plays.  I think they expect at least 4-5 yards on any given offensive play.  They really want sacks, turnovers and zero-yardage defensive plays.  When the defense is on the field the crowd gets excited about it.

The seats were bleacher-type.  My spot (#19) was smaller than my actual square-footage required.  For awhile I was sitting forward-ish while the guys on either side of me sat back-ish.  And sometimes we swapped.  And quite a bit of the time we stood up.  But then some older folks in the row behind us left and the guy on my lefthand moved back.  Then we had lots of room. Overall, less room than the cheap seats in a plane.  But folks were friendly and no harm done.

I did not try out the concession refreshments for two reasons.  One was that I didn’t want to body-surf down the row to try to get out.  The second is that I didn’t have any cash and did not see an ATM on my way in.  So I just stuck it out.  That worked ok.  I was pretty hungry/thirsty by the end.

They have something like 4-6 groups of cheerleader girls of different kinds.  There is a gang that look like they are  junior pole-dancers.  Then there is the athletic types with the big boys who throw them up into the air.  And there were flag girls and baton twirlers.  Might have been some others.  They weren’t in my part of the field so all I saw was what they showed on the big screen between plays.

They had 3-4 different crowd participation things.  One thing had a guy try to throw a football about 40 yards and go into the window of a new pickup truck.  I’m assuming that if he did it he could keep the truck.  He was not even close.  (I would not have been either).  A guy doing “punt, pass, and kick” started at one end of the field, punted, passed, and kicked a field goal at the other end.  I don’t think he won a truck, but I don’t really know.

They had the ubiquitous T-Shirt cannon down in the student section; never came near me.