The Big Game at The Big House

I'm going to skip ahead in our little journey and tell about the big game before another loss to UNLV ruins it all. Don't worry- I'll let you know about the rest of our Chicago & Amish adventures. On Friday, we finished our drive to Ann Arbor. We were a little bit worried about going into a blue town wearing nothing but red. We know how tense feelings can exist between blue people and red people. Let me just say these were the nicest blue people I have ever met. After parking our car a mile and a half away from the stadium (remember, this is still 5 hours before kickoff), we found the tailgating party. It covered the entire golf course. These people really take football seriously. Here's just an extremely small piece of the tailgating going on...






The U's humble little tent...





At the game, we didn't sit with all the other red people in the endzone 80 rows up. If we're going to travel this far for a game, we're going to sit in good seats. So we sat at the 30-yard line 50 rows up, with all the blue people. We were the only red around! I think the people around us were a little upset we were there, especially when the Utes started to dominate. But Dave reassured them that the Utes would make stupid mistakes and rack up plenty of penalties and blow a big lead late in the 3rd/4th quarters. And in typical Utah fashion, the Utes almost blew it. Luckily, they held on and we were able to celebrate the victory!

We were very impressed with the number of Ute fans that made the trip. We estimated there to be 4500-5000 Utes. I know that only accounts for 4% of the attendance (107,000+), but it's a long way to travel for a football game. For being so relatively small, the Utah section sure was loud! What a fun game! I'm glad I finally got to experience a "real" college football game.