Here are a few tidbits from the meaningless Patriots / Titans pre-season game I attended last Friday with my Wife, my Dad and my Sister-In-Law, but first, a tired mini-rant on the cost of attending a live professional sporting event that I'm sure you've heard many times before..
Tickets: $75.00 face value for this pre-season game, section 327, i.e. the upper tier, i.e where the lights are, i.e. the highest point in the stadium. 75 bucks for a game that does not count and the starters don't even play the entire game. Not to mention the fact that the seats are in the nosebleed section of the stadium. What would it cost to sit in the lower sections? I can only guess, but I have to assume the price gets higher the closer you get to the field.
Parking: $40.00 for Gillette Stadium parking. 40 bucks! To park at the stadium! This was not some independent lot trying to make a buck. This was to park in the Gillette Stadium parking lots. You would think maybe you'd get a break to park at the stadium since you just paid $75 or more just to go to the game. Granted, I am a known cheap-skate, I am fully aware of this, but doesn't charging you $40 dollars to park your car on top of the $75 you paid for your seat in the stands seem kind of like, over the top you're getting fucked? Maybe it's just me. Either way, you have to suck it up and pay it because that's just the way it is.
Granted most people arrive with multiple people in their vehicles, so the cost is distributed. We had 4 people so it came out to $10 each, which is much easier to swallow. I'll also note the fact that most people will spend hours in the lots tailgating before and after the game, so you do actually get something out of your parking spot besides just, parking.
Despite all that I still feel like $40 dollars to park at Gillette is too much and I don't like it. So there.
Beer: Ok. It was $7.50 for a plastic bottle of Bud Light. I was not paying 7.50 for a bottle of water that had a beer-like taste. Thankfully, they also had Bass and Guinness on tap and you could get it in a 'large' cup for $10.00. Well, I figured for the extra 2.50 I may as well get an actual beer, so I paid 10 dollars for a cup of Guinness. At least it was real, draft Guinness and not one of those deals where they open one of those jet-powered Guinness cans and pour it into a cup. I hate when they do that.
If we total the base amount up, it cost me, as an individual, $95 dollars to go see a meaningless Patriots pre-season game, sit in the upper, upper section and have one beer. Note that I did not buy any food inside the stadium or we'd be looking at over $100.
Someday I'd like to take my kids to a Patriots game. I have 3 kids and I'd like to bring my Wife to the game too. So to hypothetically take my family to a single Patriots game, at today's prices, it would cost me roughly $500.00.
I'm sorry but that is just wrong. This is becoming a rich man’s game.
Now, onto the game itself:
Route 495 south going toward Foxboro is a disaster right now due to the construction work being done, so we took all back roads to Foxboro. We arrived at The Razor about 40 min before kickoff. Just as we were pulling into our $40 parking space, the skies went from sunny and pleasant to ominous and dark. Moments later, lightning was flashing and rain was pouring from the skies. ‘Well this is going to be fun’. I thought. Adding to the unpleasantness was the fact that neither my Wife, nor my Sister-In-Law had brought any rain gear. I had a light, water repellent jacket with me. I was all ready to hand it to my wife and get soaked myself. Thankfully my Dad had some ponchos stashed away in one of the corners of the Shaggin Waggon or it would not have been a very fun game at all.
Since it was pouring out we ‘tailgated’ inside the van and listened to the Pats pre-game show on the radio while we ate some sammitches and waited for the rain to subside. Big shocker: I still hate Andy Gresh. I think he is awful and I can’t stand listening to him. He fully ruins the pre, post and half-time portions of the Pats radio broadcast. Gary Tanguay and Scott ‘Bledsoe’s clipboard holder’ Zolak are not exactly fun to listen to either but Gresh is the absolute worst. At least Ron Borges appears to be gone from The Patriots pre-game radio show this year… Thank God.
We headed into the stadium just around kickoff time and the rain was starting to slow down a little.
This was my Wife’s first time at a Patriots game and I was really happy that she was able to come to the game with us and see a Patriots game first hand. I am proud that I was able to bring her to her first ever live Patriots game.
It was rainy throughout the game, but not a steady downpour. It was damp but not miserably so, though I now have a little case of the sniffles from being cold and damp during the game. (Sniff…)
I thought the 1st offense looked better this week. Yes, there were a couple mistakes, including a fumble that the Pats eventually recovered and Brady threw a couple picks but they also moved the ball and were able to score. Gostkowski missed what should have been an easy field goal but also made a TD saving tackle on a kick-off. The O-Line allowed the Tennessee D to get to Brady a couple times. Overall there was some good and some bad, but that’s what pre-season is for, working out the kinks. The good guys won the first half so I’ll take it.
Defensively I thought the team looked very, very good, even with several starters held out of the game, and especially after an impressive 4 down goal-line stand to keep Tennessee’s #1’s out of the end zone.
Halfway through the 2nd quarter we were joined by a semi-drunk Jets fan, complete with a 'J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS' t-shirt. I noticed him walking up the steps and thought to myself, ‘look at this tool..’
Wouldn’t you know, he came and sat down right next to us. ‘I’m a Jets fan’ he said.
(No way, really?)
‘Yeah I could tell by your shirt’.
He made his best attempt at being annoying, cheering over-loudly whenever something bad happened to the Pats and at one point, after Brady had been sacked, shouting, ‘Take him to Mass General!’
What an a-hole. Remarks like that are totally uncalled for. If you want to root against my team that is fine, but you don’t root for players to be hurt.
He mainly showed himself to be a complete fool. After Brady had been sacked he was looking for him on the bench to see if he was hurt. Then in the next offensive series, he openly wondered where Brady had gone. ‘What happened to Brady? I don’t see him on the sidelines or on the bench…’
I leaned over and said to him, ‘That’s because he’s in the game.’
‘oh’.
Later, after a Brady to Caldwell pass interference flag was thrown in the end zone, ‘There you go,’ he said, ‘Home field advantage..’
When the ref announced that the penalty was actually against the Patriots offense, silence followed. I wanted to say something like, ‘yeah you were right, bad call’ but I kept my tongue.
My Wife found my treatment of this Jets fan quite amusing. Not that I was mean to him or anything, but when he first arrived I was like, ‘hey how ya doin’. I have nothing against a little friendly fan rivalry, but once he began jibber-jabbering about how he was a Jets fan and how The Pats were going to suck this year because ‘Brady blows and Moss is not going to save them’ and that he was rooting for the Titans, blah blah, blah, I turned my head mid-sentence and as my Wife described, ‘completely tuned him out as if from that moment he ceased to exist’.
I was not intentionally trying to be a jerk to the guy but I was not going to sit there and listen to an obvious fool’s nonsense either.
Despite the rain and the Jets fan, everyone enjoyed the game. The starters played most of the 1st half and the game was fun to watch. At one point towards the end of the 4th quarter, Pats rookie QB Matt Gutierrez tied the score with a scramble to the end zone for a touchdown.
Tennessee then moved down field for a game winning field goal in the closing minutes of the game. That was ok with us. Nobody wants to see a pre-season game go into over-time.
GO PATS
