Minnesota Golden Gophers

I won tickets to see the University of Minnesota's Golden Gophers play on Saturday, September 25th at 7:30 pm. I won four tickets and a parking pass through a raffle at work so we asked M's cousin's Lorrie and Jim if they'd join us. None of us had been to new TCF Bank Stadium before as this is the second season the Gophers have played there and while the Gophers are far from being a very good football team, we were all really excited to go see a game. There was some miscommunication (Ahem, Michael) as to whether we could tailgate but realized once we parked that we could have.  We did end up walking around our parking lot a little bit before walking a few blocks to Stub & Herb's to have a couple of beers.  We left there and walked back towards the stadium and Domino's was on the street selling medium pizzas for $3 each so we bought one and split it while walking to the stadium.  The stadium itself was very nice.  The corridors were large and wide, unlike what we're used to at the Metrodome.  Our seats were great.  They were lower level, 50-yard line, row 13 on the visitor's side.  While walking down to our seats, both M and I heard our names called and we looked around to find just a few rows above us our Viking friend Richard and his daughter.  Richard is an older gentleman who has season tickets to the Vikings that we sat next to for a couple of years.  While we don't sit next to each other anymore, we've remained in the same section for the Vikings so we still end up seeing each other each week and will wave to one another when go up to our seats.

The Gophers played the Northern Illinois Huskies and you'd think that should have been a game that we would win (but we thought that about South Dakota too) but we lost 34-23.

While we were walking in the corridor during halftime, I recognized Ryan Hoag.  For those that don't know Ryan Hoag, you can read about who he is here. For those that don't want to read about him, he's been on  multiple NFL teams/practice squads for short periods of time, including the Vikings and played in the UFL. He's from MN but if you don't know him from football, he was also on the TV show, The Bachelorette as one of the contestants in 2008. He's a really nice guy and we stopped him and said hi and he took his picture with M.