The Road Game Journal feature will detail our excursions to various Miami Hurricanes road games over the years. Hide the children, because when you wear orange and green to an opposing team’s stadium, well, they tend to not take to it kindly. The below article details our trip to Knoxville in 2002 to see the Canes take on the Vols.
Miami 26, Tennessee 3 (2002, Knoxville): This was my first trip to Knoxville and you just need to go once to be repulsed by that f’n burnt orange. It’s EVERYwhere. You can’t walk two feet in the local K-Mart without running into something with that God awful orange (don’t ask me what I was doing in a Knoxville K-Mart). The stadium itself is situated near a river and looks beautiful. I always wondered how they packed 100,000+ into Neyland and I was soon about to find out. As we walked up to our upper level seats I started to notice that we were extremely high up there. In fact, a fellow Cane fan remarked that he could easily jump off the stadium to his ultimate demise should the undefeated Canes lose.
Now, I’ve been to many stadiums, but nothing compares to how they cram you in at Neyland. First off, the upper level is beyond steep. Not once did I get up to go to the bathroom during the game for fear of tripping over a shoelace and tumbling into the lower level. Then, the seats. No wonder they get 100,000 people in there, they give you about 10 square inches per seat. I went with my 115 lb girlfriend, so I was ok, but what if I was one of those chubby chasers? Then I’d be screwed. And, I’ve seen the typical Knoxville resident…two words: morbidly. obese. These people like their fried food and lack of exercise. I saw one fat dude with a cane that had a claw at the end so he didn’t have to perform the rigorous exercise of bending over to pick something up. Jesus. And we wonder why 1 in 3 kids will eventually develop diabetes. I think that stat is 2 out of 3 in Knoxville.
Anyways, back to the game. With Tennessee unranked, I was somewhat confident going into this game, which is rare. The Canes were 8 ½ point favorites, after all. That confidence was quickly dashed when Cedric Houston ripped off a 74 yard run on the second play of scrimmage. I almost sh*t my undies. But the Canes’ D held Tennessee to a field goal and Willis McGahee took over for 154 yards on the ground. The rest was pure dominance as the Canes won 26-3. I was thankful to make it out of that stadium in one piece. Aside from packing us in there like sardines, virtually every female Tennessee fan on the premises had half a bottle of hairspray in her hair. If someone lit a match, we would’ve lit the entire place up like a Roman candle. Seriously, it would have been like a mini-Hiroshima.
As we walked to our car, we were behind Andre Johnson’s parents and I couldn’t help but think that that family is about to get a whole lot richer. AJ was (and is) a pure freak. Man, I can’t help but marvel at the talent on that 2002 team. Keep in mind that the main knock on them that year was that they didn’t beat Rutgers impressively enough on the road. In light of how prominent the Rutgers program has become in recent years, it makes me appreciate the 2002 Hurricanes that much more.
