Sharing One Home
For the first time this season The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum hosted back-to-back games. This would be a feat for any stadium, but even more so for the coliseum because the two games were for two different levels. On Saturday at 1:00pm the USC Trojans hosted the Colorado Buffaloes and on Sunday at 1:25pm the Los Angeles Rams hosted the Buffalo Bills. The coliseum was turned around and flipped over so quickly that I was shocked.
The USC game ended around 4:30 and almost immediately even with players still on the field, employees started picking up trash and marking where the grass needed to be filled in. By 5:15, the end zones were starting to be changed from USC to Los Angeles and the center logo from SC to NFL. By Sunday morning at 10am, the banners changed, the advertising changed, the hash marks on the field changed and the goal posts changed. The Rams had clearly moved in as there was no sign of USC expect the list of National Championships and Rose Bowl wins that proudly lined the press box.
Back-to-back games in a single place is hard enough to put on let alone one for college football and the other for the national football league. There are so many things that need to be changed that I did not even think about till I stepped into the coliseum on Sunday. One of the main differences that was displayed blatantly were the beer stands and beer sponsorships. But while there are so many physical differences between College Football and the NFL, the games feel a lot different to attend.
College Football, from the band to the cheerleads to the fans, is very collegiate. The feeling of attending a college game, to me, seems much more intimate. A college game gives you the feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself. As a born and raised New Yorker, my choice to come to school at USC was a conscious one and along with that was my choice to be a fan of the Trojans. I worked hard to become a USC student and now each Saturday I feel as if I get to reap the benefits of that hard work because I get to be a part of the Trojan Family and a part of the fan base that cheers on the Trojans.
While the NFL still has cheerleaders, music and football, the feeling of attending the game is so much different. Generally fans are fans because of where they are born and where they grow up living. For me, the desire to have the Rams win is not as strong as it is to have the Trojans win, even though one is my new home town and the other is my college, both of equal significance.
Football at the college level is truly for each and every age. Families attend USC football games each week from 85-year-old alumni to 10-year-old future Trojans. While the Rams do their best to make the Sunday NFL game a family affair sometimes its hard especially with the presence of alcohol. There is alcohol present at almost every tailgate before the game, both NFL and college, but the distinct difference is that for a college game the coliseum does not sell alcohol inside. On Sunday, a fight broke out at the end of the game between a Rams fan and a Bills fan who were both intoxicated. The Rams fan was upset with the Bills fan for bragging that his team won. Fights rarely break out at the end of college games because of intoxication. After a three hour game fans are not still drunk from tailgating before the game.
The coliseum is doing the best they can handling all these changes and making sure the facilities are ready for each game that they host. While the field may not have looked absolutely perfect being that you could see a faint Pac-12 logo and the SC logo hiding behind the NFL logo, the pure fact that the entire stadium was changed overnight is still unbelievable.
