rose-bowl

i was fortunate enough to get tickets to the rose bowl this year though patagonia, our team's sponsor. besides it being an absolutely awesome game, i had a number of observations. i'll share two right now:

1. it's gotta be damn hard to find the football with the stands in the background. as ultimate players we rarely have anything but green trees or fairly solid skies in the background. imagine if ultimate got really big time and was being played in a tall stadium and you're trying to pick up the angle on the hammer as it flies through a mottled background of replica white jerseys in the stands. i know a little bit about this from playing goaltimate at halftime of a chargers/steelers christmas eve in 2000. we were playing with a yellow disc and even routine passes were a little trickier to receive as they flew in front of a background of yellow and black steeler jerseys and terrible towels. i guess you'd probably adapt after a while, but it would probably be an advantage to the teams that played in those big games more regularly.

2. the texas fans were amazing, and were really focused on supporting their team. we were seated in an area of USC and texas fans. when SC was up their fans were all about heckling the texas fans in our section. it never got too confrontational (largely because the texas fans generally ignored it) but it was very ugly. when texas was up, even after enduring SC's taunts as the game wound down, the texas fans in our section were very loud and boisterous, but only in a way that was supportive to their own team and not at the expense of the SC fans. very classy and given the volume in the stadium, maybe more effective than the SC method. in thinking about how this translates to ultimate, i'm not sure if it is applicable to players on the sidelines, or if i should only think about this as a spectator of a game.