If the state wants to downgrade the Rocky Mountain Showdown into the Highway 287 Hoedown, take the Colorado-Colorado State game from Invesco Field at Mile High back to their college campuses for good.
Nothing screams college football fever like CSU’s Hughes Stadium in the first week in September. You can’t tell if fall has arrived because you can’t see any leaves. It’s one giant ashtray.
Playing in Colorado’s beautiful Folsom Field is terrific aesthetically but could be awful athletically. While Steve Fairchild is making great strides at CSU in his first year, Dan Hawkins has Colorado knocking on the top 25 in his third. This rivalry is beginning to get lopsided, and in Boulder, the only mystery would be which student body drinks the most.
Invesco Field puts the Colorado- CSU game on a national stage. No other in-state rivalry plays at a neutral site. Add an NFL stadium, and national TV is begging to cover it. ESPN wouldn’t come to Hughes Stadium if CSU gave Chris Fowler his own herd of cattle.
CU’s insistence on playing the game in Denver only when it already has six games scheduled for Folsom Field is absurd. Any small amount of money CU might possibly lose playing in Denver instead of Folsom, it makes up for tenfold with the national exposure and its impact in a metropolitan city that, for one day in September, is no longer a Broncos town.
Don’t think so? Drive down I-25 on Colorado-CSU game day and see the parking lot covered in a sea of black and green. That’s one eight-hour advertisement for college football before the Broncos start playing.
Besides, Boulderites, where would you rather party after the game, LoDo or the Pearl Street Mall? Boulder is great for buying hammocks and yak cheese omelets, but it can’t hold an incense burner to Denver’s night life.
If Gov. Bill Ritter has any athletic ability left, he should grab the ball and barrel into the middle of this line. He should force CU’s hand and drag the game to Denver.
While he’s at it, how about putting it at the end of the year? Play it in Colorado weather, in the snow.
Let the archrivals shake hands to end the regular season, with darkness settling and the lights closing on the football season.
Just don’t turn out the lights at Invesco.
