Penn State Beaver Stadium Field Entrance taken 11-14-2009

When I started college in 1997, I had never been to a college football game, and actually only a few sporting events in my life. Of course, going to Penn State would change that in a hurry, thanks to a few of my friends. Luckily, I had been smart enough to purchase student tickets and after attending a few games at Beaver Stadium, I quickly became obsessed with college football. Throughout my five years in college I never missed a game despite having two jobs, and had some great friends who often camped out overnight and wore crazy outfits at games such as a wig made out of pom poms and a braveheart outfit. This group was basically the predecessor to Nittany Nation and the infamous Paternoville.

I was first or second row for most of the games, with some of the most memorable being the game where Adam Taliaferro led the team onto the field against Miami and Joe Paterno’s win number 324 against Ohio State. I cried when Minnesota kicked the winning field goal against us in 1999, ending the dreams of a guy who gave up millions to try and win a national title, Brandon Short. This obsessive love for the game led me to want to attend some of Penn State’s road games.

My first visit to another college football stadium was on December 1, 2001 to the Carl Smith Center, home of David A. Harrison III field at Scott Stadium for the Penn State @ Virginia game that was originally scheduled as a Thursday night game on September 13, 2001. I vividly remember seeing a line in our student newspaper advertising that student tickets were going on sale at 10am. I immediately sneaked out of class and called my wife to tell her to go get us tickets (yes, I eloped to Las Vegas and was married in college). I remember her trying to tell me why the game probably wouldn’t be played, with me quickly dismissing her as silly since they don’t cancel football. It was only about 45 minutes later that we started to learn about the 9/11 attacks and many hours more before we discovered how it would affect all of our lives, including the sports world.

Looking back, 10 years later it seems kind of funny how it took so long for the news to filter down to us, but I bet we didn’t have three people in that class with a cell phone, and text messages were rarely used, while today’s staples like facebook and twitter were years away from being invented.

I enjoyed my time at Virginia and while work and living in Baltimore limited the amount of home Penn State games we could attend in 2002 and 2003, I managed to get to a few games each year. Unfortunately I had to miss the 2002 game versus Nebraska for a wedding, but at least my wife’s cousin was kind enough to make sure I had a TV with the game at the reception.

After a few years of having terrible teams, Penn State was good enough to make a bowl game in 2002, so my wife and I drove to Orlando for our first ever bowl game, the 2003 Citrus Bowl versus Auburn. Certainly a different experience that included witnessing drug deals and guns, not to mention a stadium in need of repairs. As with all of my stadium travels, I will be posting more in the coming weeks as a lead-up to the 2011 season, but believe it or not, this experience doesn’t even rank as one of my worst three!

We were finally able to get season tickets in 2004, starting my string of consecuatively attended home games. 2004 was also the first time I ever attended a college football game that didn’t involve Penn State. It was the Florida State at Maryland game at Capital One Field at Byrd Stadium. A unique experience as we got the tickets from a Maryland booster who seemed to know everyone at the game that day. We got a nice tour of the Comcast Center including a chance to meet head coach Gary Williams and player Ekene Ibekwe. 2004 was also my first time attending a Backyard Brawl game, between West Virginia and Pitt, at Heinz Field.

In late 2004, my wife and I moved back to State College, making it even easier to make all of Penn State’s home games, except for when our business got in the way and she skipped the 2010 game versus Illinois to keep things running smoothly. This is when I started to really make a push to try and get to a few different stadiums each year, making it to games at Northwestern, West Virginia and Michigan in 2005, plus the 2006 Orange Bowl at (at the time named) Dolphins Stadium.

I could go on and on about past few years as I have managed to add another 30-plus stadiums to my visited list by working around the home Penn State schedule, but I’ll save that for each of the individual stories about my trips. I think my real passion for this began when I started to look at each schools tradition, rituals and fans. I began to wonder why not every school could fill a stadium with fans like Penn State and why some schools didn’t worry about putting a good product on the field. This is why I keep attendance records of every game I can find (coming soon).

Then, I figured out that I wasn’t the only person who liked to visit various stadiums so I decided to share my travels.

In general travel, people like the guys at The Ultimate Sports Road Trip, who have attended a game at every stadium and arena across the four major US sports, in addition to a couple of hundred other venues; all of the ballpark chasers I have met on twitter; or the team at Stadium Journey, who do reviews of stadiums and arenas all around the world. In fact, my affiliation with Stadium Journey has allowed me to experience some really unique things as I have covered college football, college basketball, NASCAR, NHL, minor league hockey (AHL & ECHL), and minor league baseball so far, with many more to come. While my official, FANFARE reviews are located exclusively on the Stadium Journey site, I will be including some other tidbits on this site, especially when it concerns college football.

Specific to college football, there are people like Andrew at College Football Tour and Jarrett at My College Football Quest who share the same goal as me to attend live games at all 120 (soon to be 122) home stadiums for FBS schools. I’m sure there are more that I am unaware of, so if you know of any, please let me know on twitter.

Hopefully you will enjoy following along on my travels and will join in and share some of your own experiences either here or on Stadium Journey.