USC vs. Washington

My sister came down to visit on short notice last weekend. Since I had nothing planned, we decided to go to the USC game on Saturday. Even though I have two (graduate) degrees from USC, I've never attended a football game. Since I went to UCLA for undergrad, there was a natural tendency to avoid all USC sporting events, unless they were playing UCLA.

We checked out Stubhub but they charge a huge handling fee for tickets. We finally ended up getting tickets from the USC ticket office online. They were $55 each but USC also charged a handling fee for each ticket and some other fee for us to print the tickets from an email. I thought only Ticketmaster charged a "convenience" fee. Most venues don't charge you an extra fee if you buy the tickets directly from their ticket office... except USC. We also paid a lot for parking... $40 at the Shrine.

We spent about 2 hours on campus walking around. My sister bought some clothing from the USC bookstore and a flag to hang from her house in Portland. It seemed like the entire campus was full of people eating and drinking. Since I've never been to a USC football game before, I didn't know if this was normal or not.


Scoreboard and giant TV at the Coliseum


USC marching band before the game. I got an invitation to audition for the band when I was here the first time in 1990. I didn't try out because I was in grad school and band people are really strange.


Kick-off


USC scored their first touchdown in under 5 minutes. This was the point-after attempt. I had to explain rules and scoring to my friend from Beijing (we brought her along). Football is a hard sport to explain.


My first USC game and they lost (32-31) to an unranked team. At least it was a close game. It got too cold when the sun finally set so we left early in the 4th quarter and listened to the end of the game on the car radio.

There was some other event at the Shrine so the streets around USC was jammed with people leaving the game early and what looked like lots of Persian people trying to find parking. We went to Noodle World in Alhambra for a late dinner then home. I wanted to go and find a Kogi BBQ truck but was too tired to bother.