Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 5524690, member: 27"] Flew into Dallas Friday on American. Flight left in time and arrived 22 minutes early. Saw 1.5 movies and was given a Diet Coke and a biscotti. Nice. Had a burger at WhataBurger in the DFW airport waiting to be picked up. Solid, quite tasty. The North Dallas area has a lot of nice neighborhoods, a lot of office parks and restaurants, a lot of people walking dogs and a lot of traffic. Props to all who live here. Too much for me to handle. So spoiled living in CNY almost all my life. Had a late lunch at Oak’d BBQ. Had a 2 meat plate with prime brisket and pork spare ribs. Yes, I ordered pork at a Texas bbq place. Rookie move. It would not be the first thing that went wrong this weekend. That said, the ribs were good, and the brisket very good. This talk about Texas bbq checks out. [USER=35]TexanMark[/USER] picked me up from the airport and after our meal, we headed to @Orangello’s palatial estate, where we stayed for the road trip. Many thanks to @oranegello for hooking us up and being a great host. Another friend of [USER=597]Orangello[/USER] was already there. We eventually headed to the SMU campus to scout the tailgate location, exact locations of where cars would be parked and to finalize the logistics of getting everything on site and in place. The SMU campus is beautiful. There are a ton of small trees that line most of the roads on campus that provide a lot of badly needed shade with the near canopy they form above the asphalt. All the building have the same look and feel. Red brick. White window framing. I think this is called Georgian style. Not very knowledgeable in this but I think that is right. It is in any event quite similar to what you see at UVa, UMd, etc. They have done a nice job fitting everything into what is quite a compact campus. Not may open parking lots. I believe they have a number of large parking garages all designed to fit in with the academic buildings. In short, SMU fits right into the ACC campus wise. They have a quad similar to ours near the center of campus. Not as big but close. They use this quad as their epicenter for tailgating. It is divided into many small parcels just big enough to handle a large tailgate. You can rent a parcel and when you do, you can pay for SMU to set up mat different features to make tailgating easier. You can get a large nice nice canopy. You can get prestaged chairs and tables. Ones to hold food and cocktail tables as well. You can get large coolers, a big screen tv complete with a satellite dish and a generator, and even stuff like a margarita machine. They let you drive up near your spot and offload your stuff and then you need to drive to your parking spot and walk back. Cool approach. Works well for SMU. So many cowboy boots. 90% of them worn by SMU female students, often paired with a sundress. Most of the male students were small, dressed cool prep style and had Jonas brother haircuts. We were treated well. Some good natured kidding. A bunch of SMU oeople confided they were thrilled to join the ACC. Mark did his usual great job organizing things and the tailgate went off well. Many hot dogs and coneys were consumed and I continue to marvel at the ability of SU fans to consume massive amounts of alcohol and remain functional. The Genny screamers were quaffed in record time. Lots of people brought stuff and did jobs to help make the tailgate go well. Too many to try and document. But thanks to all and it was great to see many old friends and to make a few new ones too. The highlight for me was my first Wardynski hot dog. These come from Buffalo. Pretty sure they have natural casings. Definitely snap when you bite into them. They have a little zing you don’t get in a Hofmann. Might be even better than Hofmann. We headed over to the stadium a few minutes before kickoff. Again, the SMU fans we interacted with were nice and some of them had connections to CNY and reached out to talk to us because of this. I liked the SMU stadium. There is only one level of concourse. It is tight but given how small the stadium is, not bad. More room than the dome I think. Urinals in the men’s room. They were reasonably clean and you could get in and out pretty fast. I was too full to even look at their concessions. Mark pointed out they had a water filling station in the concourse near where we were sitting. That might have saved me from heat stroke. Heat stroke you say? Yeah. I think everyone in the ACC puts the visiting fan section in the sun. SMU also does this. We were expecting this. Lathered up with lovely sun block rated at 100 (felt like motor oil) before we left the house. Had almost no issues with the sun during the tailgate, as we were under a large, majestic oak tree (their quad was covered in them). But broiling under this sun in the stadium was tough. We survived and props to that 100 sunblock stuff. No sunburn today. Good sight lines. They had two large replay boards in the end zones but they were not HD and were pretty worthless to look at. The PA system was turned way up. Gave me a head ache. This is a place that plays a lot of music almost continually. Not much focus on the small but proud SMU band. 7 tubas. You could only really hear them when they put them on the PA system. Not my favorite approach. I like heavy focus on the band. The SMU fans are very laid back and quiet. Now it should be noted this was Parents Weekend. The stadium was half full when the game started and the stands were not full until the end of the first quarter. People were constantly going up or down the aisles, which is not good when you are sitting on the aisle. It was one of the quietest crowds I have ever seen for a college football game. I think SMU is aware they have no help from their crowd and to get a home field advantage, they constantly played piped in music at full blast between plays. When SMU had the ball, the music would stop when they broke huddle. When SU had it, they would play it until around the time the ball was snapped. Although they played it after the ball was snapped a lot. Probably more than 50% of the time. Pretty sure this is against ACC rules. I wonder if they will get in trouble for it? Let’s talk about the game. For a long time, it looked like another total disaster, much like the Duke game. The defense started well and kept us in it early. The offense just couldn’t do anything right. Man our OL got dominated. The center and guards could not open holes on running plays. Even tiny ones. And SMU was able to get pressure pretty easily. Mack could not handle his man. Got beat a lot and was called for holding twice. SMU understood we did not trust Rickie to throw it and wanted to win running the ball and committed almost all their resources tos too the run. They out their corners in an island all game long with no safety help. We had to throw long when defended like this and when we did, we had guys wide open a lot. But Rickie struggled to make good passes. A lot. We really didn’t start to move the ball and score points until Rickie started to run with the ball. SMU left huge areas of open field in front of Rickie a bunch of times and when he started to run, the offense slowly came to life. It was interesting to see him run. Really didn’t know how fast or athletic he was. Turns out he is pretty fast and very athletic. This is something we can build on in future games. Now I know everyone except possibly bnoro wants Rickie benched and wants to see what Luke can do. I understand that. In the real world, it is rare for a college QB to get their first real playing time and be great right away. It is usually takes time to figure things out. I suspect Rickie is going to en up being a fine college QB. The question is, how long is this going to take? Is he ever going to be good? If we had a QB with some college experience it would be a no brainer to go with Luke. But he is a true frosh. Yes he spent the spring here but that isn’t much to build on. Anyway, I thought in the second half, for the first time, Collins looked like a serviceable college QB. Does it make sense to invest a lot of time and effort in him and dump him so quickly? Especially when he appears to be making some progress? To me, it is all about avoiding turnovers and scoring points. The throws to players on SMU happened way too much in the first half but I saw improvement. Yes, he missed some passes and missed some receivers running around wide open but I think he did do a few checks downs, was less obvious about where he was throwing it and even hit a secondary receiver a couple times. To me, he is not without hope. We might have a player here. I think we should trust the coaches here. I am sure they care about this as much as we do and will make the right choices to give us a chance to win games. That said, please don’t put Fran Brown Jr in at fullback in crucial situations ever again. He is not qualified to play meaningful snaps at this level. And why is Will Nixon getting the ball so much on running plays? I haven’t read anything. I assume Willis was hurt early in the second half (I remember he had a nice run early that looked inspired). I assume Nixon got the ball so much because everyone else was infirm or unable to play. I know we had guys hurt. Tank keeps going down and staying down and then is back in next series. Looked like JRS had a pretty serious injury. Good to see some of the young guys getting more run. AD appears to be our best LB by a large margin. Yes, please play him more. Great to see him run down that SMU guy from behind on a sweep. Tremble seems makes a couple great plays every game now. Play him more. And Omopariola (hope I spelled that right) is a force that needs to play more. That kid has a lot of talent. Fun to watch. After the game, we had Tex Mex in a real Tex Mex restaurant. Wow. That is all I have to say about that. Going soon to some museum to see stuff about the JFK assasination. Then headed back to CNY. At the tailgate, we thought there was no way Rickie was getting benched against SMU. Too soon for Fran, who puts a premium on loyalty, to make a change. We were thinking if it happens, it will happen at the Pitt game, after an extra week to prepare. Did Rickie do enough in the second half to keep his job? We will find out in a little more than 13 days. Based only only what they did against BC, Pitt looks tough. I guess their frosh QB did well. Hoping we can mess him up in the dome. It is not an easy place to play. [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?