Mile High Stadium

Today’s Miles High Experience

Jeromey Balderrama

Today was a long day, a fun day, but a long one.  We played a great show at Signature’s Night Club last night which I’ll have to get into a bit more, but a long drive home didn’t get me back into Fort Collins until after 2am.  I woke up this morning at 8:30 and started to make my way back to the Mile High City to see the Broncos take on the Patriots. Unfortunately I gave Bethany the illness that I had last week, so she wasn’t able to go.  Luckily my buddy Matt was able to drop things and head down to the game with me.

It was definitely a cold one.  I dressed in a decent amount of layers: a turtleneck, sweatshirt jacket, and of course my jersey.  The sun finally broke out in the 2nd half and made it warm enough to take off the knit hat and gloves.

If you saw the game (and thus the uniforms), you could see that the Broncos were going back to the 60’s, and the stadium crew was trying to go for the same thing as well.  Some of the things they did were pretty clever: the Cheerleaders with the 60’s outfits and huge pom-poms, a pep band playing (what I presume is) the Broncos fight song when touchdowns were scored, 60’s music during timeouts. 

However there were a few things that completely missed the mark: The big screens (people call them jumbo-trons, Mile High calls it “Thundervision”) showed everything in black & white, and to drive home the point they put it in this obnoxious old TV border.   The idea was cute, but there were a few problems: 1) Both jerseys came across as being white on the screen, making it difficult to identify players; 2) Even though they were going with a black & white effect to make things look old, it was still in HD. 3) The typical graphics/ads/screens were pretty much unreadable.  It was just one of those things that probably took things too far.

We were treated to half-time show by the CSU Marching Band – more appropriately: the home stands were treated to the show, as that was the only section that could actually hear the band.  I didn’t realize just how bad the acoustics in the stadium were until after I heard the band.  It seemed that all of the sound got absorbed by those plastic seats, with nothing left to bounce around the stadium.

Old-school experiences aside, it was great to walk out of the stadium with a win – especially one that practically no one outside of Denver was expecting.

Twittering Monday Night Football

Jeromey Balderrama

Part of the reason I’m suck a slacker at updating my blog is because I Twitter so much.  Looking at my Twitter widget on my blog, you may have noticed that I posted to Twitter while watching Monday Night Football between the Packers and Broncos.  What you may not realize is that I went nuts on Twitter and ended up going on some tirades.  If it couldn’t be any more self-serving, I thought I would elaborate on some of my messages, especially since you can only say so much in 140 characters:

At Mile High for MNF. It smells like hair paint, and there are a ton of Packer fans.

Holy crap it smelled like hair/face paint up there, yet the closest person with paint on them was 4 seats away, it actually started giving me a bit of a headache during the 3rd quarter.

Stupid Broncos fans who sold their tix to Cheeseheads. This is pretty much an away game

The Packers/Broncos fan ratio at the game was absurd.  It seriously had to be 60/40, give or take 5%.  I thought the Pittsburgh Steelers game a week before was bad, but Packer fan managed to prove that it could be worse.  I had some theories as to why there were so many Packer fans: There were likely people like me who had Game 5 World Series tickets and sold away their Broncos tickets.  I was about to do just that, but luckily decided to postpone the sale after each loss.  I also heard that Packer fans travel well and are eager to be able to go to games.  You also take the Packer fans that live out here and are willing to front a lot of money to see their team play at Mile High every 7 years, combine them with the turncoat Broncos fans willing to sell their tickets for 30 Pieces of Silver and you get Cheesehead Nation at Mile High.

DAMMIT!! The trumpet’s back. It’s official: the drumline sucks again.

I think my issues with the Broncos Stampede drumline warrants it’s own post, but I’ll give you the synopsis: Why does the drum-line need a trumpet player that plays the same Shakira song for 4 years straight?  You have hundreds of pounds of drum equipment on the field, and it’s all ruined by the wimpy trumpet player.  I thought the Stampede learned their lesson, as the trumpet player hadn’t come around all season.  Tonight that changed.

Would it kill the drumline to learn a new song? Or at least be good at the only one you know?

There’s only so many times I can listen to “La Tortura”, and even though the drum-line reverts to rock-beat-mode it some how manages to sound like a water jug rolling down a hill.

Nothing says “I’m a huge fan” quite like painting your face… and leaving early

Dude. DON’T LEAVE EARLY! Maybe you can leave when one of the teams is being blown out, or if you have a babysitter you don’t want to keep up late – but there are no other good reasons for leaving when your team is down by 3 and storming the field on a 2-minute drill.  Oh, and “beating traffic” is never a good reason to leave early.  Chances are that you’re going to get caught with all of the other “traffic beaters”, and heavy traffic is the reality of sporting events.

We just went into overtime and these ladies in front of us decide to leave. What a waste of tickets

Once a year the seats in front of us are occupied by two ladies – I assume one is the wife of season ticket holder, and her friend.  They always somehow manage to go to the huge games, and they couldn’t be any less interested in football.  They always show up at the end of 1st quarter, stick around for about 10-15 minutes (actual minutes, not football clock minutes), leave again and don’t return until 4th quarter.  Where do they go?  They go smoke!  Look, I don’t hold anything against people who are addicted to cigs, but if your need for heaters so bad that you’re willing to miss the majority of an event you paid $112 to go to – I think you have a smoking problem.

Worse yet when they’re at their seats they talk during the whole game, don’t cheer except for the most inappropriate times, flirt with some married guy (when they’re married themselves), and couldn’t be any more disinterested in the actual game.  Here the Broncos are storming down the field and manage to kick a last-second field goal to send the game into overtime.  The stadium is ecstatic and everyone rises to their feet.  So do they – to go have a smoke before they head home.  Nice…

 

Sorry for all of the rants, but when the Broncos fail to capitalize in the Red Zone and manage to screw up 2 opportunities on the 1-yard line – it can put a Broncos fan in a bad mood.