In Gainesville, Florida welcomed an announced crowd of 53,000 nervous souls to the Swamp Saturday for an intrasquad scrimmage that featured statue unveilings, airplanes circling overhead bearing the taunts of rival schools and the first glimpse of a team with middling expectations that, based on the many, many Twitter accounts covering virtually every moment, lived down to the hype for most of the afternoon.
For Florida, 53,000 (or whatever the real number was) was an ordinary turnout that some of its nearest neighbors took as a challenge and an opportunity to show the Gators up again. Texas drew about the same number last week in Austin; in Alabama, a slightly inflated 53,000 just makes them laugh.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Stanford's spring game ?�featuring a new head coach, a Heisman Trophy frontrunner and a team that figures as a legitimate BCS championship contender this fall on the heels of one of the greatest seasons in school history ?�drew a whopping 6,800 to an all-purpose soccer, cricket and lacrosse stadium that seats about 10,000. And basically, they thought�that was pretty great:
Honestly, Stanford is probably right: Under normal circumstances, drawing almost 7,000 West Coast fans to a glorified practice ? yes, we are in here talkin' about practice, man, not a game ? is pretty good. Obviously, though, the spring "game" experience for certain parts of the country surpassed anything that might (or might not) be happening on the field a long time ago, and where outright obsession is concerned, the bar for what passes as "normal" exists on another level entirely.
And that, in one very brief nutshell, is why Larry Scott's bid for a $220 million-a-year television deal for the Pac-12 is either "visionary," or facing a steep uphill climb.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
Michael Michele Marisa Tomei Shannyn Sossamon Rachael Leigh Cook Elisha Cuthbert
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