Northwestern 34, Purdue 29

The perfect beginning to any football gameday - Mad Mushroom cheesesticks. Jill and I went to West Lafayette early and met up with Paul Fisher, my Industrial Engineering classmate at Purdue. He has worked at Walt Disney World in Orlando since graduation - pretty cool. He was back in town for the weekend since it was the annual Homecoming celebration. We were in town to watch Purdue lose another football game.
Here we see a great example of a Purdue play this year. Brandon Kirsch (surprisingly) hits the open wide receiver, in this case Andre Chattams. Chattams, not being accustomed to the ball actually making it to him, catches it, turns upfield, and dives "toward" the end zone, just in time to fumble it past the pylon. Northwestern touchback. Talk about a kick in the pants.
Ok - so we've mentioned some of the best things about attending a football game - watching some great teams play, the fans, the excitement, but there is one aspect of college football that is downright annoying and can drive you to boredom. I'll give you a hint - the picture above depicts this aspect.

Any guesses?

That's right - it's "Red Hat Guy". Red Hat Guy's job is to walk out onto the field so the officials know that it's TV-timeout time. Whenever ESPN is showing commercials - Red Hat Guy has to be there to make sure the game does not go on until the viewers at home have had their fill of Budweiser or Pontiac advertising. We have always wondered if there's a Red Hat Girl. Maybe he dates the Red Hat Ladies exclusively?

This is us on the elevator on the way to the car. At halftime. Purdue was down 28-9 at that point, and we just couldn't stand the thought of wasting our only Saturday this week to watch the rest of that bad game.
View of my sophomore-year apartment building, Cedarwood (on the left), from the roof of the Northwestern Parking Garage, on top of which we parked for the game. This apartment was a great location for going to class - being about a block East of campus. It's always fun to see how things have changed since our time here - although more often than not they haven't yet changed at all.