I did go. It was actually not a bad crowd. But they were giving a lot of tickets away at the end. They, being the promoters who brought them over, made all their money out of the hospitality suites, but there were a lot of people there. Embarrassingly it was kind of a mass of 'that guys' wearing their favourite NFL jerseys and hats like a guy who wears the shirt of the band he's going to see to the concert (and, sadly but inevitably, Pats bandwagoners out bandwagoned everyone else). But it was a good, fun crowd. It's always an enjoyable day when you start drinking at 10am at the pub and don't stop.
It started innocently and amusingly; neither team brought their band. It was technically a Rice home game (which was sadly fortunate, there is literally no way they'd have been playing if they were back in Houston) but we were hoping for the fabled Standford band antics. Instead we got a bunch of nice well meaning kids from the Hunter region who tried their hearts out and had fun and messily spelled NFL at the end which was just perfect. Then a local young lady with a good voice sang the US anthem (but not the Australian one) and messed up the words. Like, she didn't make it obviously wrong but she inserted a few different ones. It sounded basically the same. Then the NCAA ref welcomed everyone to the "Sydney College Bowl in Austria!" which I'm sure was just a get-square for the anthem. Then a cannon fired and scared the sh1t out of everyone in the stadium, and after that we were warned the cannon would fire every time Rice scored (it's their 'famous' cannon).
The game had a few things going against it. For instance, the competition, or lack thereof. Stanford recieved, and ripped a 78 yard run off the first play from scrimmage, followed by a checkdown and a spiralled TD to the tight end in the corner. 7-0, 1.5 minutes. Rice took the kickoff, took three straight delay of game penalties, punted, Stanford scored from the second play of their drive and you got the feeling it was going to get a lot uglier. If you'd done a poll of everyone in the crowd, 80 per cent at least were going for Stanford (we've heard of them). By the end of the first when it was 28-0, everyone was just cheering for Rice to do something or anything. On their fourth drive they finally gained a first down off a little dink cross to the slot receiver and the crowd went wild.
The Rice guys started firing the cannon after the fourth Stanford TD for Stanford, too, like they didn't want to bring home all the gunpowder.
The second thing was the Mayweather-McGregor fight. Basically by halftime, Standford were up by 51-0 and had pulled their starters and everyone knew the fight was on in a few minutes and like 60% of the stadium abandoned either the game to go watch it or their seats for a spot in the bars where the tv's were. That took, what, 15 minutes? Then we all went back up, and when Rice, who kept their starters in, scored on Stanford's reserve reserves in the fourth the half-full stadium went crazy.
It was a fun day but there's a lesson for the 'next' one and that's to try and get a game that might have some semblance of competitive play. I won't do it again until I see who's playing. But it was enjoyable.
