In terms of being a football fan, I think if I had the opportunity to reconsider where to attend college, I would've went somewhere other than Penn State.
Don't get me wrong now, because several people have over the course of this year, but the atmosphere around Penn State football just isn't the same as it is in the south.
It just isn't.
Penn State fans like college football. Southern football fans love it and live for it. Yeah a losing season really stings Penn State fans but it completely ruins the lives of southern football fans.
I finally came to that realization during this weekend's game at Virginia.
Let me make a couple of comparisons to back my point.
First, let's look at the pregame festivities that get the crowd's adrenaline pumping. Penn State has been doing that plain, old "Rock and Roll Part 2" bit forever now. It's really getting to be boring and needs to be replaced.
Virginia has the right idea in getting their fans into the game. On their Jumbotron screen they depicted a very creative animated scene that came to real life by its conclusion.
A cavalier sat mounted on a horse somewhere on the school's Charlottesville campus. He's peering out over the campus with a telescope and spots a troubled female student who has been chased up a tree by a mountain lion.
The cavalier spurs his horse on and rushes to the girl's assistance. He jumps off his horse, draws his sword and prepares to slay the fierce lion. But the Lion pounces on the cavalier and prepares to rip at his throat.
But the horse kicks the lion off of his rider. The cavalier then gathers himself and slays the mighty lion. He then hops back on his horse and heads to Scott Stadium after saving the terrified girl.
As he makes his way to the tunnel (this is still the animation, mind you), a real cavalier on a real horse comes dashing out of the tunnel, sword drawn and everything, to the roar of the audience.
Words can't describe how neat this was and how much the crowd fed off it.
Then Metallica's "Enter Sandman" blared from the stadium's P.A. system causing an even louder response from the audience. Then some kind of steam or smoke or something came gushing out of the Cavalier's field entrance just as the team came charging out of the tunnel.
By this point, I seriously wanted to strap on some pads because the electricity in the stadium was just awesome.
Then there are the things that happened during the game. Let's be honest folks. Thousands of the fans that pack Beaver Stadium for Penn State home games are elderly men and women who wouldn't know how to make noise if you gave them a match and some dynamite.
Scott Stadium had its share of old folks as well. But these people were louder and crazier than the students were. You'd swear they were on the verge of a massive coronary at some points.
And then there was something that was really cool. After each Virginia score, the Cavalier fans sang a song to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne" (you know, the New Year's Eve song) while swaying back and forth with their hands on their neighbors' shoulders. Everyone from five-year-old kids to the previously mentioned senior citizens knew the words to it too.
They break 'em in when they're young and never lose that sense of pride.
I know that I'm going to get responses that ask me why I'm bashing Penn State fans, but really, I'm not doing that. I know you people like football. If you didn't 20,000 or so of you wouldn't have made that trip to Charlottesville. But those of you who did go can't tell me that the atmosphere there wasn't just incredible.
Please don't bring up the fact that there were empty seats scattered about the stadium because I did see them. But overall, it was a healthy sized audience of 57,005. In terms of a ratio scale of the number of people to the number of empty seats, it was pretty much comparable to a Saturday afternoon in Happy Valley.
And this is just Virginia. The further south you get, the nuttier and more fanatic the people get. For instance, South Carolina sold out every one of their home games when they went 0-11 a few years back.
Gamecock fans also showed their true colors earlier this year when South Carolina hosted Florida. The game started at 7:45 that evening but hundreds upon hundreds of USC fans showed up at 10:30 that morning to welcome ESPN's College Gameday crew. Then that night during the game, every fan wore black in a bonding promotion to "blackout the Gators."
The intensity grows even more the deeper into Dixie you go. I remember Bo Jackson once said that if college football was played on Sunday's nobody would ever attend church in Alabama.
And how about the infamous "Earthquake" game at LSU where the fans were so loud and raucous that they actually created seismographic activity that was recorded in a laboratory on the Baton Rouge campus.
The list just goes on and on about how passionate southerners are about college football.
To reiterate though, I love Penn State (as a fan of course) and I have always enjoyed going to games and being part of the atmosphere that is Nittany Lion football. But there's just something different about the collegiate environment below the Mason-Dixon Line that truly makes college football the greatest game in the world.
Just remember Penn State fans that I'm not bashing you. I'm just telling you that there's more to a great football atmosphere than renowned tailgating.
