Tomorrow marks the official one-week countdown to the game everyone's been talking about since West Virginia shocked Georgia in January's Sugar Bowl. The coaches are slaving over game plans, the players are more focused and hungry than they've been all year, and the fans and university officials are...arguing over the halftime festivities?
WVU band director Jay Drury said he was contacted Tuesday by Louisville band director Greg Byrne and informed of a change in the halftime schedule.
Originally, both the WVU band and the Cardinal band were to have three-and-a-half minutes each to perform.
"I was called by their band director, who was instructed to give me a statement from the University of Louisville president's office," Drury said.
He said the statement indicated the Louisville's athletic department had scheduled a large number of honors and presentations that needed to taken care of at halftime.
"After much deliberation, on Oct. 18 the decision was made to limit the University of Louisville's band performance to three-and-a-half minutes," Drury said he was told by Louisville officials. "For the same reason, no time was left remaining to feature the WVU band on the field. Needless to say, we were shocked."
If the band does travel to Louisville for the game, Lofstead said there could be other options for them such as playing in the stands or at a tailgate party. The band already has hotel reservations in the Louisville area.
Jesus...they... they already had hotel reservations. Why? WHY????
We probably should have prefaced this by saying that while we don't generally mind bands, we're not very fond of band members.
Band music is one of the things that makes the environment at a college football game special, the synchronized marching is also swell, we even dig those snazzy uniforms. But when you see these guys and girls on tv or at the stadium, it's hard not to believe that they're the type of people who are cheering 20 seconds after a touchdown run even though everyone else in the stadium realized during said scamper that it was going to be coming back after a holding penalty, or the type of people who can't believe their eyes and act like they should be taking snaps when they see a pressured quarterback throwing a ball away on 2nd and 5 early in the third quarter. And then when we see these young men and women with far better seats than us, well it kind of pisses us off.
Pride of West Virginia eh?
To be honest we can't even remember ever seeing an opposing team's marching band playing on the field at any time during a home game. Not saying it hasn't happened, just saying we're usually more focused on eating, getting other people's thoughts on the action, or urinating.
Guess what we're getting at here is we don't care about your marching band. Jurich has done what Jurich does which is get really cool things put together, and if your band, and our band for that matter, had to get das boot then so be it.
You get a marching band with Kevin Pittsnoggle playing trombone and wearing a custom made sparkly outfit and we'll talk, until then we really don't give a shit. It's football, in fact, it's the biggest football game this state's ever seen. We're sorry that we had to back out of the original deal, and that you had already booked a hotel, but kids, you're not the main draw here.
Seriously we can't believe we're even talking about this eight days before toe meets leather. (Iverson voice) We talkin' bout marchin' bands?
Let us never mention this again.