CFB Travel Guy

My love of traveling to college football games actually began huddled around a manually tuned radio.

Until the late-90s and 2000s, there weren’t very many nationally televised college football games, and my childhood team — LSU — wasn’t very good. My parents met while attending LSU, but by the time I was old enough to appreciate college football, we were living in Florida. LSU was rarely on national TV and we weren’t able to access the local TV affiliate because was were too far out-of-market.

So on some Saturdays, my mom, dad, 3 older brothers, and me would sit in the living room around a small mid-80s Radio Shack Special and try to pick up the radio broadcast from a station in the Florida Panhandle that carried LSU games. We had to sit very still, knowing that any accidental jostling of the radio or newly-introduced object of interference risked losing our crackling gateway to LSU football.

I still remember the chill I’d get walking from the tunnel out to our seats, surveying the immaculately manicured grass that seemed almost too green. I remember hearing the marching bands play and the way the home crowd did the Gator Chomp and the deafening roar after a big play. That’s the stuff that hooked me.

Along with one of my older brothers, I eventually attended the University of Florida, switching my primary allegiance to the dismay of my parents and extended family, but my love for experiencing a college football game live remained intact. As a student, I began making road trips with friends to watch the Gators and check out different SEC venues, and I continued doing so after graduation, while also hosting a tailgate for almost every home game.

By 2017, though, the tailgate started to dwindle. Friends were dispersing around the country, getting married, and having kids. It was tough for everyone to make it back to Gainesville week after week.

At the end of that year, one of my brothers took his first job as a commercial airline pilot, relocating to Michigan. When the 2018 season rolled around, we decided that we should start checking out some Big Ten games near his new midwestern home. I was an airline/hotel points fiend and my brother could fly standby to wherever he wanted to go, so what was stopping us?

We started with the Colorado–Nebraska game in Lincoln, Scott Frost’s first home game as head coach of his alma mater. We ate delicious local burgers, grabbed beers in the Haymarket, tailgated with incredibly kind and welcoming Husker fans, somehow ended up with access to the club lounge, and witnessed a thrilling game that came down to the wire.

I decided then and there that I needed to branch out more and check out more stadiums and campuses around the country. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.