Not Ready For The Big Time

On Saturday, while fasting for Yom Kippur, I headed down to Stanford Stadium for my first in-person look at the 2011 Stanford Cardinal football team.  I was excited not only to see the team in action, but also to be a part of what is a completely different fan atmosphere this season.  The buzz around Stanford's National Title hopes and Andrew Luck's Heisman Trophy candidacy can be heard all over Palo Alto and, unlike for most games last season, I knew that Saturday's crowd would be good.  Having secured a student ticket earlier in the week, I had a gameplan: check out the tailgating scene for a bit before zipping through the student entrance in time to see some pregame warmups and watch the team come charging onto the field.

While the tailgating scene was good - pretty lively and better than anything I saw on campus last season, despite the fact that Saturday's game was against lowly Colorado and lots of Stanford students were likely up in San Francisco for Fleet Week festivities - entering the stadium was a complete nightmare.  The company hired to man the turnstiles was clearly unprepared to deal with the large number of students arriving just prior to kickoff.  There was one meager entrance open to thousands of students, while the general admission gates were wide open but unwilling to scan student IDs.  As a result, there was a 45-minute backlog to get into the stadium, preventing the majority of the "Red Zone" - the Stanford student section - from getting into their seats before kickoff.  By the time I finally made it in, Stanford had just scored its second touchdown, and the first quarter was basically half over with the Cardinal leading 13-0.

 Once they were finally allowed in, over 50,000 fans packed Stanford Stadium on Saturday,

Stanford had a great opportunity to build on the early season buzz and momentum and create a great game experience for the fans, but stadium management blew it big time.  At any school with a solid fan base, the student section brings the noise, energy and enthusiasm.  Any fan of a school in the SEC or Big XII or Big Ten, where stadiums hold 70,000+ and many of those are students, can tell you the same.  What does it say about Stanford football, then, when stadium management can't figure out how to get the students into the stadium in an orderly and timely fashion?  To me, it says that while Stanford's football team is ready to compete with anyone in the country, the athletic department still has a long way to go if it wants to put Stanford football on the map.