Game 66: Kennesaw State Owls @ Middle Tennessee State Blue Raiders

Travel

Our first of two midweek games of 2024 brought a somewhat early wake up for me to catch my flight.  In order for me to get a direct flight to Nashville, I had to depart from Fort Lauderdale and not the much closer West Palm Beach.  This makes it a slightly more than hour drive to the airport.  But all went well and it was not a 3am wake up so that was at least something.

Spotted at the Fort Lauderdale departure gate was a woman in a Middle Tennessee State shirt on my flight to Nashville.  She had to be one of the 50 people in attendance at this game.  No other reason to be on this flight.  I have already seen more college football gear on my flights out of south Florida to Quest games than I ever did out of NY.  I never would have thought that.  

 The Southwest flight to Nashville had plenty of empty seats and I was even able to get the best seat on the plane, which for those of you unaware, is the emergency exit row seat that doesn’t have a seat in front of you.  It’s not an aisle seat, but the lack of any seat in front of you makes up for it.  Which brings me to my dumbass award of the day which goes to the woman in the emergency row in front of me.  She was in the middle seat in the row in front of me, which is the row that does not have a window seat which is why I had no seat in front of me.  It is simply missing as that is just part of the configuration of the plane.  So my bag is under the seat two rows ahead of me, which is where my bag goes.  I was in my seat with my bag under the seat as the woman sits in her seat and tries to figure out why she can not place her bag under the seat where my bag is in an effort to have the space under the seat in front of her completely empty.  She seemed thoroughly confused about how this was working.  It was as if this was a personal offense to her that she could not use both spaces.  Why was my bag where it was and not under the non existent seat?  Perplexing.  She then proceeded to spend 5 full minutes figuring out why her seat would not recline.  She was in an emergency row and the seat behind her was an emergency row.  It will not recline.  It is not broken, it is by design.  Dumbass.  I feel there needs to be a stupidity test in order to sit in the emergency row because if this woman was in charge of opening that window, we are all dead. I must repeat, dumbass.  

I arrived in Nashville and Al arrived shortly thereafter.  We headed over to Dollar to pick up the rental car.  I had tried to check in online all week but Dollar’s technology is rooted in the 1950’s.  I was told at the desk that I could head directly to the Dollar kiosk in the garage.  At the Dollar kiosk, I was told they were closed and I needed to go to the Hertz kiosk.  The Hertz guy, who was very nice, was pissed that Dollar kept sending people to him, but he processed the rental after yelling at Dollar over the walkie talkie. We walked back to the Dollar section and got our car.  BTW, Dollar and Hertz are the same company.  This was highly inefficient, but I think the entire rental car industry is based on inefficiency and just wasting people’s time so they can charge more.

We got the car and drove from Nashville to Murfreesboro.

Middle Tennessee State University

We drove straight to MTSU and headed to the student union, as it was time for some shopping and food.  After a quick shopping stop in the bookstore, which had about 50% of the lights on, we went to the union for some food.  Only one stand was open, which seemed very strange for a mid day on a Tuesday.  One of the workers told us Subway was also open in another building.  That did not seem appetizing so we decided that snacks at Starbucks would do and then we would do an early dinner. So we headed to the Starbucks at the library.  It was also closed.  But it had a sign with the fall break hours.  It was then that we realized that the school was on fall break.  This explained the lack of students for a Tuesday.  

 So we ate nothing and just went on our usual self guided tour of the campus.  But during our walk around, we did come across MTSU setting up something called “Party in the Grove”.  Not sure who did this first, but Ole Miss might want to look into this for copyright infringement.  

As an aside, MTSU athletics was unable to accommodate our request for credentials given the high demand that this game was generating. In addition, they were unable to provide us with any basic information about things to see/do, tours, etc. We received only a link to purchase tickets in response to our outreach. Al thinks this will cause him to create new website rankings for worst AD support of the Quest, as this was at the top considering the size of the school and their choice to not provide passes versus making us buy $8 premium seats in an empty stadium. Dumb.

Hotel
We left campus and headed to the hotel, a Hyatt Place, which I will say, is a very nice hotel brand and almost never disappoints. After a bit of rest, we changed into some warm weather clothes for the game. Did I mention that it was going to be cold? Did I mention that we said we were not doing cold games anymore? Whose idea was Tennessee in late October? Did I see that we are going to Ohio for a night game in November? Who does this schedule?

Dinner
We stopped for dinner at Slick Pig Bar-B-Q. It was quite good. I opted for the 2 meat plate with ribs and brisket. Everything was very good. I was especially fond of the brisket and the baked beans. I would maybe make one adjustment next time and opt for a different bread choice other than the corn bread.

Pre Game
We headed back to the MTSU campus for the game. Here is a helpful hint for those of you attending MTSU football games in the future, the grass parking spots are first come first served. They were not close to full when we arrived for this Tuesday night tilt. Al is currently hysterically laughing that Jarrett actually typed this last sentence “helpful hint for those of you attending a MTSU game in the future”……get real. No one is going, and I’m not telling anyone to ever go here UNLESS they are also on a never ending Quest!

After parking, we headed over to the Party in the Grove. Things were in full swing and there were about 15 people milling about listening to the headlining entertainment, which was a country singer who by the sound of it graduated from MTSU a few years back. I did like the bales of hay to sit on.

We watched the 1Q from the beer garden before heading to our seats for the rest of the game.  We happened to be in that end zone for the safety that KSU got to open the scoring. We got a great view of MTSU getting stuffed trying to come out of their end zone after stopping KSU on a 4th and goal from the 1.    KSU led 2-0.

I am not going to recap the game.  The final score was MTSU 14 and KSU 5.  I wish that I could say that this was defensive excellence but it was not.  This was poor offensive execution at its finest.  This is KSU’s first season as an FBS team and it showed.  They really did not come close to scoring the entire game, with the exception of their first drive.  MTSU did not do too much better on offense.  The game had 16 punts.   We were cold and watching poorly played football with less than 1000 people.  

Now a word about attendance figures.  We know they are made up.  But the announced attendance of this game was over 10,000.  There is not a chance that it was even 1,000.  Yes, I know that they count everyone in the building.  But it still was not over 1,000.  There were probably not even 10,000 people in Murfreesboro on this night since it was fall break.  Someone was seriously drinking when coming up with that number. Al agrees and feels the need to vouch for this stat; there were under 1000 people there. Easily.

Wednesday Travel

We awoke on Wednesday and headed out to the airport in Nashville.  We arrived and returned the rental car. The attendant informed us that we had $10.99 in tolls on our rental.  This was impossible since we did not travel on toll roads and we had not opened the electronic toll pass.  We were told we would have to go to the Hertz desk to have this taken care of and of course there was a line.  After getting to the front, we got the same rep who was excellent the day before.  He told us this is normal and he took the charge off.  Two things:

• This should not be normal.  You should only be charged when you use tolls.
• We were credited the 10.99 but not the tax on the $10.99. So Dollar got us for about $1.50.
• This is a scam.  Dollar is doing this on every rental and banking that people don’t fight it and if they do, it is a $1.50 additional tax.  
• I am also assuming that the charges were for usage of the electronic toll pass and not actual tolls.  This is only supposed to be charged on days that you use the toll pass and not every day of the rental.  
• There is some serious scheming going on here.
• I have another rental with Dollar coming up and if it happens again, there may be some letters being written to some AG’s.

We entered the airport and I chose the line with the overzealous TSA agent who decided to pull aside 50% of all bags in her line for additional screening.  Every other line is proceeding normally, this line has bags stacked up for additional screening.  My bag was pulled aside because of the chargers in it.  I think somebody needs additional training.

Al tried to get on an earlier flight but was blocked by American Airlines bureaucracy.  I had no other earlier options to Fort Lauderdale.  But the rest of our travel on Wednesday went without incident.

I feel like there were a lot of gripes on this trip.  Sometimes that is just the way it goes or maybe that was just the mood I was in when I wrote this trip report.  Either way, I do not think a repeat run to Murfreesboro, Tn is in our future. Al says “not a chance in hell”

Postscript
KSU finished the season 2-10, 2-6 in Conference USA which was good for a tie for last place. This game was the 6th in a 6 game losing streak to open the season.

MTSU finished the season 3-9, 2-6 in Conference USA which, like KSU, was good for a tie for last place. This game did snap a 5 game losing streak for the Blue Raiders.

Photo Gallery

For our MTSU photo album, Please click here. You can view as a collage or run as a slideshow. There are comments to explain what is in the photo but most are self explanatory. Thanks to Google, I can no longer embed the slide show with comments.