Sights And Sounds From The Worst Game I’ve Ever Been To

All day Friday and most of the morning Saturday I was having an internal debate on whether I would go up to East Lansing for this game. On one hand, I had no expectations of MSU pulling off an upset. On top of that, it was supposed to be cold and rainy. But on the other hand, I knew some other people attending the game and it is still a cool experience to have a media pass to a game. So around 3 PM I made the decision that I would, indeed, go up.

And boy did that turn out to be a poor decision on my part. Because what I saw during the three plus hours that that game lasted was absolutely the most depressing thing I have ever seen from Michigan State. The final score of 49-0 is something you would expect from an early September game between a Power 5 team and a crappy non-major. But for this to occur between two conference opponents is downright pitiful.

Now I do need to put my hatred of um aside a moment and say this. J.J. McCarthy is good. Maybe even very good. I won’t go so far as to agree with what Seth from MGOBLOG said in our Q&A, that J.J. is a first round pick, but I could see him going day 2 in the NFL draft. He made some real good throws. He was lobbing bombs and hitting his receivers down the sideline in motion and he was lasering darts over the middle into tight windows Yes, there were instances where MSU’s defenders were in good coverage; Angelo Grose had a great play on um’s first drive where he broke up a pass down the left sideline. But all of us in the press box looked at one another and agreed it was a hell of a pass.

That’s enough about the opponent. Back to us. Before the game started, I decided to use my media pass as a bit of an all-access pass and went into the student section. I was happy to see that the student body had not totally abandoned this team and there are still people going in over two hours before kickoff to get the front row seats.

I even chatted with a few of them to gauge their youthful confidence. Check out the optimism on this Spartan:

And since I was in the student section, I decided to go back to my younger days and I led them in a “Go Green, Go White” cheer. I lost my voice doing that.

After leaving the student section, I went to the opposite corner of the stadium to catch MSU’s pregame warmup. Here’s everyone’s favorite coordinator getting his guys ready.

Not too far away from this scene, I caught these pictures that are worth a thousand words.

From my perspective, Coach Dantonio looked completely disinterested in being there. From my time standing there, I did not see him talking with any players or coaches. I still don’t know what he was brought back to do. And at this point it would not surprise me if he does not continue in whatever his role is through the end of the season.

But you know who did look excited to be there?

AJ Hoggard in the house! This seems like a good time to mention that there are just FOURTEEN DAYS UNTIL BASKETBALL SEASON STARTS!

Okay, so then I went up to the press box. Here is the last exciting part of the game.

You all know what happened after that. Even those students that were so amped up before kickoff grew bored quickly. Here is what the student section looked like at the start of the 2nd half.

Yeah, some of the visiting fans moved into the abandoned section.

To all of you who attended this game in person, I hope you enjoyed many trips to the beer counter. That was my last trip to East Lansing for a football game this year, but I am planning on going to the Penn State game at Ford Field since that is just a few miles down Woodward from my house. In the meantime, let’s just hope that our AD does something good with this coaching search.

Happy Monday everyone.

P.S. I just want to add one thing. Each week I have had a writer from another blog page come and do a Q&A for us. They are taking their time to contribute to our content. If you don’t want to read what they have to say, don’t read the article. But one of you crossed a line this past week. Whichever of you created the username “spartan” the day I published that article just to hurl insults at my friend from MGOBLOG, well, let me just say that that was in poor taste. I wish SB Nation had the capability to track the IP address it came from and find out who was behind this. Let me say this. You aren’t cool making those comments. You aren’t a bad ass. And you make TOC look bad and you will make other writers not want to do these articles with us in the future. I hate having to say this right now but, to all of you, please don’t ever do that again.

P.P.S. Back on the lighter side of things, I need to recognize this wonderful pun.

Congrats MSUNavyGrad on being this week’s TOC Reader Of The Week!