At The Lions Game

As detailed before, we spent Sunday and Monday this week in Phoenix. Sean and I attended the Detroit Lions vs the Arizona Cardinals NFL game on Sunday afternoon. Suzanne and Savannah went along to have some girl time out and then some family time at the end of the day and Monday.

Unfortunately, the Lions were totally humiliated by the Cardinals. The final score was 31 – 21, but the game wasn’t anywhere near that close. It started out nicely for the Lions with the defense picking off a pass on the Cardinals opening possession and promptly going in for the score. It went all downhill from there. For example, the Lions managed a pathetic -18 yards on the ground for the day. Yes, thats a negative number. Of course, they only attempted 7 rushes all day. They looked very bad – a stark contrast to the 6 – 2 record they brought in to the game. You can read my entire breakdown of the game on my Detroit Lions Fans blog.

For some reason, I had a hard time sleeping the night before and only managed maybe three hours sleep the night before. Suzanne said she would drive so I could try to get some sleep on the way up to Phoenix for the game. It took us about 2 1/2 hours to get to the stadium. Suzanne dropped Sean and I off at the stadium. We got there about noon for a 2:15 game. Originally, Sean and I were going to tailgate because the girls weren’t going to go to Phoenix. Since they went, we let them have the car and we walked around the stadium, outside and inside just soaking it up. This was Sean’s first NFL game, so I wanted him to experience it all.

The first thing we did was get some food. Or, in Sean’s case, a whole lot of food. He ate a hot dog, nachos, popcorn, peanuts, two pretzels, a sprite and a gatorade. He must have been hungry. 😉

Our seats were very high up in the stadium. I think there was maybe 10 rows at most above us to the top of the stadium. We were on the home side of the field about even with the back of the end zone. Basically, not the best seats in the house. Still, the tickets were $80 a piece. Going to a football game these days is a whole more expensive than I remember.

There was quite a few Lions fans in the area that we were seated in. Actually, there probably was somewhere between 10 and 20% of the fans wearing Lions blue for the game. Sean seemed to enjoy the game quite a bit though he was very disappointed that his team didn’t win. He also would have liked better seats but in the days of seat licensing they are hard to come by now. I thought the angle of viewing that we had actually game me a different perspective on the game than I have had in the past. I could easily see the plays developing and see what was going good and what wasn’t. I usually have had “better” seats.

While we were at the game, the girls had lunch together at a Chinese restaurant and enjoyed some pool time at the hotel. They picked us up after the game and after well over an hour of getting out of the parking lot we went back to the hotel for some dinner. One would think that in the modern era, they could design traffic flow so it didn’t take an hour to get out of the parking lot, especially considering that we were almost the last folks to leave the stadium.

Anyways, we enjoyed a bit of family time in the hotel room at night and in the morning before driving back home this late morning. The trip was short but fun. I just wish the Lions had won or at least played better.