If you ask most college football fans — let alone coaches and players — they’ll tell you the best part of the sport is its pageantry-rich, on-campus gameday environments. The excitement of the action is amplified by everything surrounding it.
This isn’t the NFL, where billion-dollar taxpayer stadiums are leveled and replaced every quarter century or so. College football cherishes its ancient roots, its local customs. The stadiums become celebrated entities of their own — the Horseshoe, the Big House, the Coliseum, Death Valley.
Big or small, urban or rural, they draw out their own traditions — balloons in Lincoln, checkerboard end zones in Knoxville, a Buffalo run in Boulder, Touchdown Jesus in South Bend.