College Football Preseason Fun, Part 2

Only three more days till college football season starts here in Happy Valley with a home date against Florida International! Granted, FIU is quite possibly the worst team in Division I Bowl Subdivision football (with Temple and Buffalo, two of Penn State’s other non-conference cupcake opponents this year, giving FIU a run for their money as the worst team in the nation), so it won’t be much of a contest, but still, football’s back! I get really pumped up for the upcoming Nittany Lions season when I watch videos like this one (I thought I’d try something new and occasionally embed youtube video clips to my blog entries — click to start it):

And I absolutely can’t wait for the pageantry and atmosphere of the Blue Band marching onto the field before the game to the roar of the Beaver Stadium crowd of 110,000 shouting “Ohhhh, Ohhhh, Ohhhh, LET’S GO STATE!”:

And the 2007 preseason Herbie Awards are out, and Kirk Herbstreit of ESPN sure gives Penn State a lot of love, picking them to win the Big Ten, saying that we have the best student section (gotta love the white out!!), and that we’re on the top 10 list of best GameDay locations (hopefully that means they’ll pay us a visit at least once this year!).
To prepare for the first tailgate of the year this Saturday morning, I bought two hurricane warning flags (3’x3′ red flags with a 1’x1′ black square in the middle) to fly at our tailgate. It’s been a pain to try to give directions to our tailgate in the past, as conversations have had to go something like this: “Okay, so do you see that green Hess flag? Alright, cool, now look further down the line, and do you see the confederate flag with the Nittany Lion logo in the center? Okay, well, we’re *somewhere* in between those two.” Now we can just say, “Look for the hurricane warning flags!” So I’ve taken up a bit of a collection and gotten those paid for. We’re such nerds, but at least now we’ll add to the Happy Valley tailgating atmosphere with even more flags flying, but these will be both unique and weather-themed, haha!
Then we had the problem of how to fly the flags. Our plan was to buy several sections of either PVC or metal pipe and have threaded connectors to screw the lengths together, to get a 15-20′ pole. We’d been tossing around several ideas of how to secure the base of our flagpole so that it wouldn’t fall over. One basic idea was to get a piece of steel, aluminum or thick plywood and drill a hole in it to use as a plate for a car wheel to drive onto (so the car can serve as the anchor weight), and drill a hole in the plate, sink in a flat cap into which we could screw the bottom length of pipe. The alternative plan was to get a square piece of half-inch plywood, set a tire on it, bolt the tire to the plywood base, and pour concrete halfway up the height of the tire, setting the bottom length of pole in the concrete. That would’ve been quite heavy, and would’ve certainly had a big enough footprint that it wasn’t gonna tip unless we actually had a hurricane! But after much hemming and hawing over what to do and how to accomplish it, in the end we just decided it’d be easier to spend a bit more money ($97 with S/H) and just buy a 20′ telescoping pole and a drive-on aluminum plate base. It’ll be relatively light (lighter than the concrete-filled tire, at least), easier to transport, it’ll last for years (we can bequeath it to the grad students in the department after we all leave, along with the flags), and we know it’ll work without much trouble on our part. What we don’t know is if it’ll get here by Friday or not. If it does, awesome, if not, then I guess that’ll be one more reason the Notre Dame tailgate will be awesome the following week! We’ll have to take up a collection for that too, but I’ll let Walter take care of how he decides he wants to shake people down, since the pole/base went on his credit card. 😉
Well, and now for the original reason of this post. I’ve gotten a few more sets of college football preseason surveys from friends (Andrew Bennett, Robert Carver, Lindsey Long), so it’s time to publish them for all the world to see! If others would like to fill out a survey and have it published on my website, just go right ahead. You can either leave it as a comment, or email me separately. So in the order that I received the picks, here they are: