mtgrizrule said:
Air Force is great pageantry, and a good atmosphere, but not louder than WAGRIZ. I am surprised CU made the list, I have been to a few games there, and the atmosphere stunk, and it was not loud. Maybe 15 to 25 years ago, they belonged on this list, not now though.
Permit me a story, please, before I segue into my main point:
When Dr. Robert Ballard descended the murky depths of the Pacific Ocean to explore the shattered ruins of the USS Yorktown, he expected a ravaged, rusted and rotted hulk three miles below the murkey blue. She had absorbed bombs and strafings, fires and explosions before a final Jap torpedo sent her down into the cold, briny deep. Instead, Dr. Ballard found the mighty warship in noble condition. Her wooden flight decks and galvanized steel conning tower were still as noble and gray as the day her dive bombers sent three Jap flat-tops to the bottom. Very little deterioriation had occurred in the sixty years since that June 1942 day when the tide turned in the Pacific. Why?
Paint.
Layer after layer coated the warship. Crew after crew kept every inch of the ship clean and freshly painted. Maintenance and the drudgery of every voyage she undertook... As both discipline and keeping the swabbies busy had resulted in coat after coat of paint that ultimately acted, in the harshest and most inhospitable environment, to preserve the grand old lady.
And what does this have to do with college football, you might ask?
The men's urinal at Air Force.
It is more of a piss gutter, really. It was once concrete, but layer after layer of battleship gray paint hides its original surface. No need of urinal cakes to keep this pisser minty fresh, for class after class of incoming plebes going back decades surely spend many Sundays on hands and knees scrubbing each asparagus-reeking drop of football-fan piss from those Yorktown-esque layers of paint. I've never experienced a cleaner and more efficient public urinal in all my days, nor have I ever made squirt with more pride.
I wanted to salute this pisser while humming the battle theme from Top Gun, but my hands were full and I was also certain that any further drunken football fan revelry on my part might result in an undercover black opps crowd control fellah to tackle me face-first in my own urine, pretzel my legs to my nose, and have me on a cargo hopper halfway to Guantinamo before I had to take my next piss. Still, I took heart knowing that those brave men who protect our freedom with state-of-the-art million-dollar hardware all started there, helping add a layer of paint so that I, an intoxicated visiting-team outsider, could take the finest piss in all my days.
Later, sometime between when Brandon picked a fight with the band at a country bar and when Chad passed out in the Waffle House booth, I bought a round for the boys and toasted to the Air Force Stadium men's urinal, which in this stadium-goer's experience has the greatest stadium pisser in all the Wide World of sports.
To address the thread topic at hand, three F-15s flying by thirty feet above the top deck make more noise than I've ever heard in Missoula, at least for five seconds or so. It was incredible and louder than the Hueys or even those Warthogs from a few years back. Crowd-wise, though, we're much louder. Then again, the cadets didn't have much to cheer for that day.
