47-3

If you hadn't guessed already, I was in NY city on Friday evening (had that delicious egg cream for breakfast Saturday a.m.) and then drove down to the "shore" to Lavallette. The real purpose of this trip was to go to the Jets game today.

You can see from the color of the sky that it was a perfect weather day for football. Well, almost perfect, it was a bit chilly for me. But that's because I have become used to the Texas heat and have less tolerance to cold than these New Yorkers. Mike and his brothers have season tickets to the Jets games and I got to use one of them. The seats are in the upper deck but right around the 50 yard line so the view was excellent.

In two years they will open a new stadium right next to the old one. Can you believe that as cold as it gets here, they are not building a roof on the new stadium? Seems pretty crazy to me to build a whole new stadium when there is not much wrong with the old stadium and not make it weather proof. Oh well, they didn't ask me.

Here's what you can see of the new stadium from inside the old one. Looks a lot like the Austin skyline! LOL

Before the game Jimmy set up a tent and a grill and tables and chairs and began cooking a stream of food from the time we arrived until it was time to go into the game. So all this eating and drinking required to "tailgate" began around 8:30. I resisted until 9:15 having my first beer. Ugh. Here are Mike and Peter chomping on some chicken wings.

And the usual tailgate games were played for high stakes.
There were exactly 4 port-o-potties to serve the entire tailgating population. After about 9:30 you really didn't want to go in any of them. Here is an intersting sign that I saw while waiting in line - it says "NO PARKING ON GRASS." Hmmm. Isn't that grass where these cars are parked?

Around 12:15 we started in to the stadium for a 1:00 kickoff.

Like the UT Longhorns (but without any smoke or video effects so it is much lamer) the Jets run out of the tunnel onto the field. My task was to capture Brett Favre when he came out. Unlike the others who strolled out and waved to their adoring fans, Brett sprinted out so fast that I could hardly catch a picture, but I think that is him below about to run into the flags.

This is the first play of what was to be a momentous and historical game for the Jets. They scored a touchdown on their first possession.

Before we knew it, it was 10 - 0.

By halftime, the score was Jets 40, Rams 3. The second half wasn't nearly as exciting, but still a lot of fun. The final score was 47-3, but it would have been higher for the Jets if they hadn't decided to be good sports and not score any more. Really, they were pretty classy (unlike other teams), they put their 2nd stringers in and didn't run it up at the end. By the end, we were like the only fans left in the stadium though. Many left when it was halftime, the rest left at the end of the 3rd quarter. We stayed until 2 minutes left. This was the greatest margin of victory EVER for the Jets and it was very cool being there.