Game Day - Chiefs are going down.

Well as you can guess this was written after the game.  I am pretty sure that there is no way I would have put in that heading before the game started.  But lets go back to that start.   Arrowhead stadium is not the prettiest stadium you have ever seen.   If you want to judge it's curb appeal you would give it a 2 on a 5 point scale.   It looks bleh from the outside.   But that really does not matter because what you are really looking at outside the stadium is the thousands of tailgaters.   Basically every parking lot around the stadium is open to tailgate and tailgate is what they do.  And in a big way.   There are the wimpy little people with a few chairs and a grill, but there are also many that do it up big time.  One, for example, had a full size smoker in the bed of his pickup and was smoking rack upon rack of ribs and who knows what else.  There was the group with an 8' table spread from one end to the other with serving platters and bowls and flower arrangements and crystal glasses and china plates.   There was the group who set up a teepee and was doing the tailgate in there.   There was just about every kind of anything that could be cooked on a grill being cooked somewhere.  There were touch football games and bags contests and ......  And they started at 7:30 in the morning.  By 8:00 the lots were mostly full and by 9:30 when we got there we couldn't find a spot in the lot we had a pass for.  Finally the guy directing traffic said if we could get the jeep over the curb to the grass we could park in this little spot at the end of the parkway.   Jeep, curb, no problem and spot found, but it was probably the last spot in that lot and the lot we were in was no different from most of the other lots.

Enough about tailgating.  One of the new things I want to do is to point out the differences or unusual things that each stadium has going for it.   For Arrowhead it started with the horse and rider on the field.   My only thought was what would Soldier Field grass be like after a horse trotted up and down the field.  It really is too awful to contemplate.   Other unusual things:  When they do the national anthem a large percentage of the crowd sings along.  I don't recall that from any of the other stadiums thus far.   When they end the national anthem instead of the "home of the brave" they say "the home of the Chiefs" and everyone shouts out the word Chiefs.   Not sure how I feel about that one.  As long as we are discussing the national anthem, another weird thing is they don't have a large flag banner being held by people on the field.  Almost every other stadium does.  Instead they have a large Chiefs arrowhead being waved up and down on the field.  Pretty sure I know how I feel about that one, but I will let everyone decide for themselves.  When they finish the anthem they do this whole guest war Chief thing where someone selected takes this huge mallet and pounds on a giant drum while the whole crowd does this war chant and does this tomahawk motion with their arms.   To be honest it looked like a bunch of wind up nerd robots the first time people did it.  By the 10th time it was just creepy.  Another unusual thing is that the fans stand up for every play when they are on defense.  For the whole game.   Very strange and to those of us wanting to watch the game a little bit annoying.   Now some positives is they applaud when a player gets up from an injury and heads to the sideline no matter which team it was.   This is different from most stadiums where they only do it for their players or a certain team from a city which supposedly promotes brotherly love but will otherwise remain nameless where they cheer when the opposing teams players get hurt and boo when they get up.

There have been some people who question which stadium is louder KC or Seattle.  Having had the chance to be at both two weeks apart, I must say Seattle is louder and the fans are more disruptive.  The Seattle fans start shouting from the moment the other team heads to the huddle, where the KC fans just yell at the line of scrimmage.

The fans were generally very nice.   They got a bit less nice in the last 5 minutes of the game or so, but you can't really blame them for that.  In any event there was only one person who was rude and she wasn't too bad. 

Bears fans were represented pretty well.   I am always amazed at how many Bears fans travel for the games, especially as almost all of us expected them to lose.   Probably between 5 and 7% of the stadium were Bears fans.   But boy, give us even a morsel to be shouting about and Lets Go Bears breaks out as loud and strong as you can want.

I mentioned in the last entry that I was going to make some observations about traffic and construction.   I have observed in the several thousand miles I have driven in the last couple of weeks that construction comes in 4 varieties.  There is the mile long set of cones to move you to one lane for the one guy doing something on the side of the road type of construction delay.   There is the several mile long set of cones because they are thinking of doing construction at some point in the near future, with near being a highly variable point in time.   There is the small warning before the lane goes away and you are suddenly upon the people doing construction.   And last there is the we are going to block off a lane on this side of the road because they are doing construction on the other side of the highway.   The last one seems to be limited thus far to Montana.   As you wander the streets and highways of our country let me know if you find any other major classifications of road construction.

Next week we take on Detroit.  As we have already been to that stadium and to be honest it was not a pleasant enough experience that I want to repeat it, we won't be following the Bears there.  But after the bye and the home game against the Vikings we will be heading out to San Diego.  We will give you all the scoop on the Chargers trip, so stay tuned and as always - GO BEARS.