#1, I have never understood the draw of the tail gate party. Especially when it's in sub freezing temps! I can drink with my friends and eat food with my friends right in the comfort of my own living room or local sports bar! But it's the in-laws, and they got us the free tickets right? We go to the tail gate party. $15 to park about 10 minutes walk away from stadium. There goes the "free" part of this game.
#2, I guess the last time I went to a college football game (I've never been to a pro game) the TV bigwigs hadn't figured out the huge amount of money they can make from television ads during the games. I swear to god that they were stopping this game like every 5 minutes and I don't mean game time minutes! Now, that may not seem like much if you're watching a game in warm weather and have plenty of beverage and snack vendors roaming the stands. But THIS game was played in temps that were in the 20's and a windchill of the teens or lower! And we were sitting like 10 rows from the top of the stadium and it was snowing lightly, and being up that high it was even colder and we had the breeze blowin and i used to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow barefoot, well, you get my meaning. So each and every game stoppage was excruciatingly loooooonnnngggg!!!!! Not a single beer or hotdog vendor to be found! And we were a LONG ways from the bathroom which I guess wasn't too terrible seeing as how we didn't have any beverages in the stands to drink and what piss was already in me was as frozen as the rest of me!
Whoever the mastermind was that decided to have an OUTDOORS bowl game in a northern clime should be strung up!!!!
#3, How either of these 2 teams got a bowl game to begin with is beyond me. Now, I was admittedly in the nosebleed seats and really couldn't see the game in great detail, what I did see, and I looked on fairly intently the first half, didn't look like very good teams. In the end they seemed to be fairly evenly matched and in the end the score was 21-20 so it might have seemed like a good game to someone who was sitting in a nice warm recliner with food, beverage, and a bathroom close at hand. But I think that if the game had been played in warmer conditions, the Miami team would have won in a landslide even though they really didn't seem to be all that good compared to most of their past teams of the last 20 years.
Moral of this story is, when offered "free" tickets to an outdoor bowl game in a northern state in late December, DEFINITELY look that gift horse in the mouth!
