My friend and I drove up from DC. We were told before hand that the stadium is no where near the actual campus. We wanted to check out the campus just to get a feel for it, so we drove out to Storrs, CT which is about 30 mins from the Stadium where UCONN actually plays. We got there and were of course decked out in BYU gear. The campus is in the he middle of farm land and is actually very beautiful...glad we went. We got a couple light hearted jokes from some students and for the most part everyone was really nice. I've gone to both Ole Miss and South Bend and I would actually rank UCONN in between the two as far as the fan base being nice (Ole Miss first, Notre Dame third). Because the stadium is 30 mins away, all the students load up on busses and the school ships them down to East Hartford.

We drove back to East Hartford and got to the game just as the BYU players were finishing their warm ups...so not much to report on there. As we walked around he stadium, we kept expecting to see more BYU fans than we did. Out of all the BYU games I've goner to, this was by far the weakest showing by BYU. Our fan section was very small...I would estimate 2-3K.

The first half was great for BYU (everyone saw that on TV I'm sure). The penalties throughout the game were just as frustrating in person. All the fans...BYU and UCONN fans were getting very fed up with the refs. It got so bad that the refs would even throw a flag against BYU and the UCONN fans were upset yelling at the refs to just stop with the flags. Maybe it played out differently on TV, but at the stadium a lot of the penalties seemed baseless. My favorite was the unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. All the UCONN fans around us kept saying "I don't see how that could have been a penalty unless he said something to the player or the ref", then another speaks up and says "Mormons don't swear so it couldn't have been that either". Pretty funny.

The second half seems to stall quite a bit...as I'm sure everyone saw. Those two fumbles really killed our rhythm. The final stop at the goal line was the proudest moment for the BYU fans there. It was right by the BYU section.,,we were loud and you could tell it had an impact. Towards the end the "B Y U, B Y U, BYU" chant was the only thing you could hear in the stadium...so that was neat.

While at the game, none of the UCONN fans really seemed to care to converse with the BYU fans. At Ole Miss and Notre Dame the fans would always strike up convo and ask if we travelled from Utah or where we were from, etc... Nothing like that here, but that may be more of a function of being on the East Coast...people just not as personable.

Their student section cleared out very early. I would say only about 10 percent even stuck around for the 4th quarter. Maybe there were some back to school parties everyone wanted to get ready for...not sure. But several alumni told us that is pretty typical and that as the season progresses it gets even worse.

After the game all the players came and gave high fives to the fans who could make it down to the first row, and the cheerleaders and Cosmo stuck around interact with the fans, take pics, etc...

Afterwards we went outside the stadium to see the players coming out and getting on the busses. A few UCONN players came out the same exit and while it wasn't apparent from the stands, up close the BYU players were WAY bigger than the UCONN players. After that, the one thought that came to me was that we should have beat them by much more and that Texas isn't going to have that size disadvantage.

I saw a lot coaches (Anae) and players come out and talk to former players, family members of players, etc... It was really cool. Everyone was in a very up beat mood. Hopefully that translates into confidence going to Austin in a week.