Stanford Hates Fun

Welcome, delightfully amateurish reader, as this week I give you the lowdown on the exciting experience of visiting Stanford for a football game. Despite still being COVID-positive, the CDC guidance appeared to indicate that with mild symptoms we were OK to go out after 5 days, and anyway, it's outside and we wore masks all the time.

Stanford is a tremendous university, and is responsible for the birth of many legendary Silicon Valley companies. Stanford students, however, have a certain pride in celebrating their irreverence, and have this mildly affected ramshackleness about everything they do. For many sports, the ramshackleness isn't affected: Stanford genuinely aren't good at many sports. And football is one of the ones that they're definitely not good at.

As you can see from the picture, the stadium itself is impressive, seating 50,000, and indeed there was a relatively recent plan to upgrade it and host the Olympic Games here. That certainly feels like a stretch, but what you've got here is basically a professional-standard sports stadium with the cornucopia of quality dining options which that implies here in the US.

Americans love to opine about how the food in the UK is terrible. I don't subscribe to the idea that food is magically better here (I've been to Wendy's, Arby's, Applebees and more), and in fact Helen's so traumatised by the nachos I had down at SAP Centre that the mere mention of the word appears to turn her stomach. The food you get somewhere like the Stanford Stadium is basically the same as you'd get at any big sporting event in the UK, although with substantially fewer pies. I do miss pies. [Note to American readers: pot pie isn't really pie, and pies don't have to be sweet]

So anyway, the football. Well, it didn't start well for Stanford, giving the ball away and letting their opposition Washington State score twice in the first 5 minutes. It didn't get any better from there: the punt is meant to be a defensive tactic in American football, where at the end of a possession that you know you're going to lose, you punt the ball down the field as far as you can to ensure the opposition have to gain more yards to score. However, in this game, the punt was quite a good offensive tactic for Washington State: Stanford were so good at losing the ball that punting downfield and intentionally giving it to Stanford was fairly likely to result in getting the ball back. A special highlight was when one Stanford player tackled another Stanford player; that pretty much summed the afternoon up. Washington State unsurprisingly ran out winners by a telephone number score.

Of course the highlight of any Stanford sporting fixture is actually the band and the Tree (Stanford's mascot), although at this game they weren't without controversy: there's a protest going all called 'Stanford Hates Fun', the details of which are difficult to understand, but it resulted in one Tree getting suspended and the old Tree having to step back in. Anyway, they ran around and played enthusiastically, if not well, just like they always do.

We continued to test positive for COVID during the week, finally testing negative just yesterday, on day 14 for Helen, and day 10 for me. Onwards!