New Orleans Notes

Before we move into a long, cold winter without football or hockey, a few final notes on the Sugar Bowl and the city.

• My distaste with their team’s final drive aside, the Auburn fans I met on our flights down and in New Orleans were uniformly quality people — knowledgeable, dedicated and fired-up. And, like I’ve said, until the 1:57 mark I had no problem at all with their team’s play.
• That said, it’s curious how that sequence changed Hokie fans’ postgame mood for the better. Until then, I think we would have left the Dome in low spirits, quietly acknowledging Auburn’s superiority and wishing we could have just hit a few more passes earlier in the game. Instead, our heads were held high, and we were chanting “LET’S GO HOKIES!” down the square-spiral ramps, out onto the entrance plaza and on the way to the French Quarter.
• And yes, I’m with Coach Beamer: if in the preseason, you’d have offered me a 10-3 year, with a loss to an undefeated SEC team in a BCS bowl, I’d have taken it in a second. It was a magical year — maybe more so than 1999 because of how it happened.
• It’s easy to say this after last night’s beatdown, but I was saying it yesterday morning too: USC is a better team than Auburn, based on both the season as a whole and my observations from the games we played against both teams. USC played us tougher and faced a legitimate non-conference schedule pre-bowl, as opposed to the Tigers.
• Speaking of said Tigers’ out-of-conference schedules, they’re so terrible because Auburn decided recently it had to have seven home games every year and no OOC road games. No self-respecting I-A program will offer a visit or two without at least one return, not even most MAC schools, so they wind up with WAC, Sun Belt and I-AAers on the schedule. One effect of that decision was the cancellation of a 2010-11 home-and-home contract (see 8/11/03 comment) with… Virginia Tech. How much do we Hokies wish those games were still on now? Quite a lot.

And finally, my non-football thoughts on New Orleans and the trip. - DON’T EVER STAY at the Hilton Garden Inn New Orleans Convention Center. They accepted reservations and took deposits — sometimes double deposits — for rooms they didn’t have; they promised on-site parking, then sent us to another Hilton nine blocks of semi-ghetto away that charged near-double the price and made HGI guests pay every time we took our car out; they had no interest whatsoever in addressing multiple customers’ complaints with this treatment. Not exactly what I expect from a major national chain — I’ve gotten better customer service walking into a Super 8 off I-64 without a reservation at 1:00 AM. - Finally being (well past) 21, I ventured into Harrah’s Casino downtown for the first time on this, my third visit to New Orleans. All I wound up playing was slots, though, since (a) I haven’t bothered learning poker yet, (b) the rules for the non-slot video gambling machines were even less worth figuring out, and (c) the lowest-stakes blackjack tables were $25 a hand! Given $1 or $2 blackjack tables, I might have stayed a while (or until I hit my pre-established loss budget). Instead, I got bored after losing $7.25 on about $15 in bets and was gone in half an hour. No danger of gambling addiction here, in other words. - I don’t really like New Orleans as a city, and that’s a shame. I’ve seen what the heavily French-influenced New Orleans could be if it offered a calling card other than public drunkenness with a side of moral corruption, or even if it just bothered cleaning up after itself. That city is Montreal, which I love. - Cool highway infrastructure, though. Most of New Orleans’s expressways are built as elevated viaducts due to the high water table, but they’ve kept them far enough from the waterfront to avoid destroying the shoreline view like Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway, Boston’s I-90 pre-Big Dig, or Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct. And the infrastructure is old enough, since urban NO hasn’t grown much in the past 40 years, that it predates the era of standardization in highway design. Add Louisiana’s traditional interest in using public works projects as total pork job programs, and your result: some pretty wild — and probably expensive — highway ramps and interchanges. - Continental Airlines, how I hate thee. 33-minute, two-terminal connections in the gigantic Houston Intercontinental? Perfectly legal! 1200-mile, three-plus-hour flights on regional jets in which I can’t stand up straight? Awesome! - Of course, Airtran, the only airline I’ve flown that specifically bans GPS use in the air, is no picnic either. But at least we got 90 minutes for dinner in Atlanta. - Nothing says fun like a morning security pat-down at Dulles.