This is our first stadium review. Yeah, I know, Silliman on Sports has never done stadium reviews but JerryWorld is SPECIAL.
    First off, approaching the stadium you can see it is big and shiny and silver, like Aunt Sadie’s hair. But I guess it’s not as strong because Aunt Sadie’s hair didn’t need two ginormous hairpins to hold up her beehive.   

    As you get closer tailgate parties spring up everywhere. There is an RV park where everyone has a grill and then all around the stadium are tailgate tents directly in proportion to the number of people who hear that inside the stadium $9 dollar hotdogs awaits them. Since Jerry is getting paid for tailgate space rental, he’s won either way. In fact Jerry Jones thought of everything, right down to the midget parking attendants… for the compact cars.
     Approaching the entrance you were asked to divide into separate sex lines, men in one line, women in the other for a pre-entrance pat down. Did it make me feel safer? Not really. I had pants with six big pockets where a .38 special could hide in two of the pockets and yet all the pat downer did was tag my shoulders and just above the waist. It was the same with the women’s line. Not once did the pat downer assume a .38 might be hidden in a bra.  

    We were in section 438, the top section of the stadium. Not just in 438 but 20 rows up in 438, five rows from the top. Rumors persisted about possible elevators and escalators but apparently $80 tickets didn’t entitle you to use them. So much for a $1.4 billion dollar stadium mostly paid for by taxpayers. Tickets to enter don’t mean you get tickets to ride. So we took the ramps… and the ramps, and the ramps, and the… Let’s just say the top seating is 220 feet above the playing surface, 22 floors high, which is fine if you’re just taking stairs because that’s a measly 360 stair steps, but by ramp… rising at one inch per foot, translates into three-quarters of a mile of ramp to get to the fourth level. Then another forty feet up to get to row twenty… which is where, after you tip your Sherpa, your nose starts bleeding… all over your binoculars… which you need if you want to see the action on the field. Here again, as mentioned earlier, Jerry foresaw these problems and figured you’d like to watch the game on TV so he installed a 160’ crystal clear screen to keep you from looking down at the field.   

    The KingKongatron was impressive except it rarely showed the score, and never flashed up the stats except at halftime. As impressive as the screen was, the sound system was not… and you needed a good sound system and a strong announcer because you couldn’t hear squawk from the field, in Section 438. You couldn’t hear the band, you couldn’t hear the cheerleaders, you couldn’t even hear Bob Stoops screaming at his players. And that is significant not hearing.   

    As far as the game, I knew OU was in trouble the moment Boomer, one of the two horses pulling the Sooners’ conestoga wagon, had an accident on the field. By accident, I mean a biological accident. The biological accident wasn’t so bad, just that it was on a plastic field. Sort of here’s where biology meets chemistry. Worse than that, Boomer had such a sad face as the Roughnecks scolded him. You know your day is not going to go well when the game hasn’t even started yet and your mascot is getting a talking to.  If BYU’s Cougar had an accident, we would conclude the same but, typically, she was busy chasing younger men.

    All in all, nice looking stadium, in need of a scoreboard with more information, a more visible 25 second clock, better sound system, cheaper hotdogs and more elevators. Score it a B+.