Oxford/Ole Miss was awesome

Notanative - You have confirmed my suspicion that your posts stem more from familial resentments MSU fans feel toward the "flagship" Ole Miss than anything legitimate. As UT fans, we are all familiar such rants and the self-esteem deficit they spring from, since we have seen the same thing eminate from College Station for years. Indeed, for the same reasons so many UT fans are so happy we wont have to go to College Station anymore, you can rest assured UT would never schedule a home-and-home with Miss State.

Stay classy, Starkville.
 
I can buy his books at Barnes & Noble, notanative. I went to Rowan Oak to see where the man worked, where he wrote. Plus, it's a beautiful antebellum estate, sold to Ole Miss by Faulkner's daughter after he died.
 
Good time indeed. I too like the tailgating situation in Austin better. So damn cramped and crowded at the Grove, and the lack or bbq pits and smokers is huge. They're an absolute must, along with the free flow of kegs, etc.

Good time at the Grove, no doubt. But I'll take the tailgating we do.
 
Yep...Filipino. I've mastered making adobo and calderetta. After track practice in HS, I always fixed myself up a halo halo.
 
Hi Texanne,

I remember the 2005 Super Regional and was in Oxford this past weekend.

The football fans must be from a different mold than the baseball fans. I agree with you that some of the Super Regional Ole Miss fans were real asses. Remember when Drew Stubbs' dad started climbing across rows of seats to get at that drunk spoiled frat brat? There was none of that frat brat idiocy that I saw this weekend.

I've never experienced a more gracious group of away game fans. Everyone I talked with there was friendly.

And they weren't fake-friendly like the NU fans were. Ole Miss football fans were genuinely nice.

I would imagine Ole Miss is the friendliest venue in the SEC. Several did talk about how they hated LSU fans, whom they said were the worst in their conference. That's not been my experience with LSU fans in Omaha, but then I've never been to a football game in Baton Rouge either.
 
"Yep...Filipino. I've mastered making adobo and calderetta. After track practice in HS, I always fixed myself up a halo halo."

I'm ready. What time is dinner? Alot of folks on this board dont know what they are missing.
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Drove through campus around 7am the next morning. The Grove was spotless. Like nothing happened the day before. If you watch the time lapse video, you'll see a crowd of workers at around 3am cleaning up the place.
 
I had a blast, and I agree with whomever said it was their best gameday experience since the National Championship game at the Rose Bowl a couple years back, BUT there are some downsides to the way they do things, and Ole Miss fans do start believing their own hype a bit too much about "we have the best tailgating scene, period, and everyone else's is crap."

First, it did seem a bit crowded and crammed-in at The Grove. The tents being right on top of each other lent itself to that feeling of claustrophobia. The lack of open flame was great, but by mid-afternoon, everyone was getting their drunk smokes on, which perfumed the air with cancerous burning leaves. Normally, that's not a huge deal outdoors, but the humidity and the tents seem to trap that cigarette air. It just kind of hovered right at head level. Moreover, near our tent, there was a loud, stinky generator. I get wanting to have the flat screen television and satellite and so forth, but that is basically an open flame, right? Or a closed flame, I guess. It's burning a fuel in, again, a humid, cramped space, so it sort of defeats the goal of banning grills and smokers. At Texas, if someone has a generator or a smoker or is smoking, you typically have enough space to just sort of move away. And at Texas and most other places I've tailgated, there's far more room for things like washers, throwing the football around, and otherwise moving around.

That being said, the hospitality from Ole Miss fans was amazing. The Hotty Toddy Potty was a pretty sweet setup-- air conditioned, sinks, stalls, etc. The Ole Miss gals lived up to the hype in terms of wearing minimalist prom dresses and heels and such. The campus was definitely pretty. The stadium was easy and not a nightmare like some stadiums are in terms of getting in and out. The vibe was electric. It was a great place to be, no doubt.

But back to the lack of open flame. When I am drinking, I just want some grilled meat more than anything else. Sausage, brats, burgers, or better yet, brisket and ribs and such. We went to Abner's for chicken strips, because they were allegedly the greatest and tastiest local choice. Meh. They were bland and kind of dried out, and just not very tasty. And even if they had been the best chicken strips ever, they just don't cut it for tailgate food, I have to say. Neither do most of the weird finger foods everyone had. It's just a little off.

I did see some fancy tablecloths, but I never did see the chandeliers that apparently "everyone" has at their tents.

In general, it was an amazing trip. People in Oxford were amazingly nice and welcoming. And the general tailgating scene was probably "better" in many ways than the broadly spread out, dispersed, on-asphalt (or in-garage), often last-minute tailgating that happens at UT. I think it would be amazing if the East Mall, West Mall, South Mall, Speedway, etc., became tented off tailgating areas right on campus. As more and more of those state parking lots just South of campus become museums and condos and other things, maybe that will be an option in the future. Right now, I feel like UT tailgating is sort of a weird mish-mash of corporate-sponsored and fenced off tailgates, special fenced-off donor/alum tailgates that are really more about getting UT fans to buy 7 dollar beers before the game, and sort of random people just kind of winging it, with only a small percentage of really legit homegrown tailgates. And then there's the far-flungness of some of them. It feels like you're tailgating in some random city parking lot, not on or near a college campus.

Even though The Grove was overcrowded for the Texas game, I like having such a great centralized and designated space for tailgating, and I am sure it is really pleasant for most other games, except when they host a top 2-3 SEC team with a lot on the line.

Oxford was definitely not prepared for Texas fans. I knew cabs were few and far between, but my pregnant wife really needed to get home, and the taxi companies weren't picking people up or answering their phones. After walking to the town square from the stadium at halftime due to her feeling extremely sick, we figured one of the bars/restaurants would be able to hook us up with a cab. Nope. So we sort of dialed a bunch of numbers over and over and tried to flag the handful of van cabs down. No luck, but finally a very nice Ole Miss recent alumni couple offered us a ride. Very kind of them. That was the kind of thing we had happen to us constantly in Oxford, at different levels. People were just so warm and welcoming all over.

One thing, though, that was funny, is that everywhere we went, people working at restaurants and bars and such were having nervous breakdowns. They were simply incapable of handling the stress of having ten times more customers than usual. At The Pizza Den on Sunday morning, the lady behind the counter was literally bawling and talking to herself, and at one point she yelled out offers for people to help her work. "$10 bucks an hour. Make it 15. 20. Whatever you need!" I felt bad for her, but it was truly so awkward that we just left and went somewhere else-- to Newks or Newk's, with or without the apostrophe, I can't recall.

More on that not being prepared thing-- we had reservations for dinner at City Grocery for 10pm Friday night, which I thought was late already, but we didn't get seated until after midnight. The food was good and creative and interesting, but to be seated after midnight meant we had our wine cut off at 1am per Oxford's weird alcohol rules. So that was odd. Again, these places were simply not prepared for Texas. Even at Abner's, which is basically just frying up chicken strips all day, didn't have our order, and people were poaching other people's orders, etc. At another place our friends went on Thursday night, it became a comedy of errors. They kept ordering things, and they kept running to the back and then running back to the table to tell them "sorry, we're out of that." It finally came down to basically two choices on an entire normal menu that they WEREN'T out of. Just a bit amateurish, and for all the talk about this being such a huge economic stimulus for Oxford, I am sure a lot of business was lost by their restaurants and bars just not being prepared.

Anyway, great time overall. Any of the negatives (and legitimately overrated, overhyped aspects) of Ole Miss and Oxford were far outweighed by the uniqueness of the whole thing. They really can back up their famous claim about maybe not winning every game, but winning every party (or at least be in the discussion). I hope Texas fans can adopt a few of the Ole Miss gameday experience attributes into our own over time. And I hope Ole Miss fans have a good time in Austin next year. My guess is they will.
 
We had a great time! We walked down the row from our tent and were going to walk around, but were afraid we would get lost! We had tons of booze and wonderful catered food, but realized about an hour before the game that there was going to be lots of both left. We found some UT kids who weren't going to the game and said "this is now all yours!" You'd think we had just handed them the keys to the kingdom!!

We saw some Ole Miss kids doing the horns down, and quietly told them that it made them look like aggies and that was not a good thing. Everyone was great, though! I would love to see the Grove and the campus on a non-football day - it looked like a beautiful campus.
 
The Ole Miss group I was with had a great spot and set up. We were just down from sorority row (by the Phi MU house), just across the street from the main part of the Grove, and easy access to the Hotty Toddy potties. We wondered over to another friends tailgate in the heart of the Grove and experienced all that but were also able to avoid the mass of humanity if you chose too. It was fun watching the crowd grow all day and the group I was with said this was the largest crowd they have seen (rivaled by the LSU game in 2003).

As many others have said, the Ole Miss fans as a whole were great. Very hospitable and friendly. I like how the tailgating in all centrally located (guess I have gotten used to it b/c that is how it is done in Tuscaloosa....on a slightly different scale). The group that hosted me and the wife plan on going to the game in Austin and I would expect our fans to show them a good time.
 
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