I recently had the chance to catch up with a couple of the biggest college football fans in the country. Keith and Phil Arnold, from RoadtoGameday.com, were kind enough to spend some time with Johnniefootball.com. Many thanks to the Arnold Bros. and good luck to their Cretin-Derham Hall Raiders in the State Semifinals this weekend.
Phil (far left) and Keith enjoying some of the scenery earlier this season in Gainesville, FL.
TDT: I’ve been reading your site for most of the Fall and it really is an unbelieveable trip. Could you introduce yourselves and give some background on the details of what you guys are doing this college football season?
Arnold Bros (AB): We both went to Cretin-Derham Hall in St. Paul and played football, hockey, and baseball there. Phil played for parts of two seasons at Wisconsin as a walk-on under Barry Alvarez, and I (Keith) played baseball for two season at Notre Dame. Most of your readers probably understand how college football, at least D-I college football isn’t the biggest deal in Minnesota, but going to ND and Wisco got us pretty deep into the game. I’ve spent almost four years living in Los Angeles and working as a writer there, and live down the street from Bruce Feldman, a college football writer for ESPN. The idea for this trip hatched on my roof top deck over a couple cold ones, as I tried to tell Bruce how great it would be if ESPN GameDay did more features of what it was like at the game, as opposed to about the game. I sat on the idea for a couple months and talked Phil into it after he graduated last May, right before he was going to take a job in Chicago. Basically, we rented a car, picked some games, and started driving the last weekend of August. We’ve been going ever since.
TDT: What college towns have you visited so far? What is ahead on the trip/schedule? How do you decide which game to attend each week?
AB: We’ve been to Gainesville, USC, Arizona State, Georgia, Wisconsin, The Red River Shootout, Austin, Morgantown, Columbus, Lawrence, Kansas, and right now I’m writing you from about a mile from Autzen stadium in Oregon. (You can see our map at www.roadtogameday.com/journey) We’re going to take off tomorrow to make the short 1,500 mile drive to Colorado for the Oklahoma State-Colorado game, and then head down to Norman for the showdown between Texas Tech and the Sooners, before seeing Notre Dame probably get waxed by USC. At the beginning of the season we had a pretty good idea of where we wanted to go each week, but we pretty much threw the schedule out the window when teams started getting knocked off. Some places, like Autzen, we always wanted to see, others, we just wanted to be at a big game. I’m hoping we get to storm the field with the students just once this year, but we’re running out of chances.
TDT: How many miles have you put on your vehicle so far? What are you driving on the trip? Do you have sponsors?
AB: We’ve put about 15,000 miles so far on the car we’re driving, which is a rented Saturn Vue from our friend who runs an Avis Rent-A-Car. (If anyone is ever in Scottsdale, rent your car from the DoubleTree Hotel, tell them Road to Game Day sent you, and they’ll give you a great deal.) As for sponsors, we had a couple near misses with big national companies like Toyota and AllState, but they didn’t quite know what to think of guys like us, with a website that had nothing on it. We’ve got a few investors who’ve given us some seed money that’s gotten us through the season without going broke, and hopefully we can reward them when the site starts to really take off. We’ve also reached a deal with SportingNews.com where we write twice a week about our adventures, and that’s been great for bringing in new readers.
TDT: What kind of accomodations are “the norm”? Are you guys eating fast food along the interstates of America or getting some decent grub at the advice of some of the locals?
AB: We eat fast food almost every day. It’s getting disgusting, but we do it. That said, when we get to a town for a weekend, we always ask around to see what the best place is in every place. We’ve had a lot of great grub in different places, but we definitely had a pretty full Monopoly board after a few weeks of McDonalds. Too bad all we got out of it was a few free McFlurries. As for lodging, we usually just throw the city onto Hotwire or Expedia, and find something decent for under a hundred bucks. We stayed in a really sketchy place in El Paso at the beginning of the season, where we could’ve probably thrown a rock into Juarez, Mexico, and decided we had too many nice computers and a HD video camera to risk it.
TDT: How are you getting tickets to the games each week? Scalping? Any interesting ticket buying stories/scams?
AB: We’ve been scrounging for tickets every way possible. We’ve gotten the scalpers ticket market down pretty good now, but we had a bad start. We bought tickets in Georgia for what we thought was the ‘Bama game, but were really the Central Michigan game. Luckily no one came for the seats. Bought tickets for the Penn State-Ohio State game on eBay. Had some guy smuggle us into the stadium in Texas, when they played Mizzou where we thought he was going to hand us end zone tickets and he just walked us through the gate where he knew the usher. We’ve paid as much as $360 for a pair (Columbus) and as little as $30 (Kansas). A good rule of thumb: If people are selling, never buy them more than 10 minutes before kickoff, and always make sure they’re together… and for the right game.
TDT: What kind of media exposure have you received? How many hits are you fellas getting on your website/blog each week?
AB: We’re doing okay for media exposure. We’ve been mentioned by Bruce Feldman at his blog, and Pat Forde plans on doing something on us in the Forde Yard Dash. One of our columns at SportingNews has become the most commented on story in the history of TheSportingBlog, which got us in some hot water with West Virginia fans. As a two man team, we really haven’t capitalized enough on advertising, and neither one of us knows anything about the internet world. That said, our videos are pretty popular, and our most popular one has had a little over 13,000 views on YouTube, and we’re getting almost 500 visitors a day.
TDT: You guys are living most college football fans dreams. Many people fantasize about quitting their jobs and traveling the country to watch the “Game of the Week”. What made you guys take the leap of faith, so to speak, and actually follow through with it?
AB: I quit a good job in Minnesota to chase the writing dream in Los Angeles. It was horribly frightening, and always embarrassing having to explain to family and friends that you were “that guy” who was moving to Hollywood. I was only trying to be a writer, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like if I wanted to be an actor. I had some good success as a screenwriter (with nothing making it to the screen yet), but was stuck in complacency at a job that sounded much better than it was. It was comfortable, but mind-numbing. I remembered why I moved in the first place, and with Phil just graduating, it was the last chance to do this before we both had something too good to quit. Hopefully the book I write about this, and the website helps both of us in the future with what we eventually want to do, whether that’s college football related or not. Either way, I’m proud that we had the guts to actually do it… and we’ll both be ready for a break when the season is over.
TDT: What have you guys learn so far on the trip that you maybe didn’t expect or has been a surprise to you?
AB: Texas is a horrible state to drive through. Southerners really are hospitable. Girls from Arizona State get a lot of boob jobs. Chick-Fil-A is really as good as advertised.
TDT: What are you doing during the week (besides driving to the next game) to stay busy?
AB: We brought an XBox 360 along with us to play, and Phil has been absolutely dominating football, and hockey, while I’ve been getting the better of it lately in Tiger Woods golf. Other than that, I really thought we’d have way more free time that we have. We’ve been listening to a lot of books on tapes in the car, and have polished through some good ones lately, in addition to a lot of good reading. Best football book of the year: Boys will be Boys by Jeff Pearlman.
TDT: Any fisticuffs or vehement disagreements with the various drunken fans along the way or between the two of you since you are spending an ungodly amount of time together?
AB: After our West Virginia column we got a lot of mean comments and emails calling us racists, biased, and everything else you could think of. I think it’s safe to say we won’t be going back there any time soon, although we held back a lot of footage and comments that would’ve really made them look like hillbillies. Keith nearly got into it with some frat guy in Wisconsin who claimed his father was a high powered Manhattan attorney who would sue us if he was seen on the internet. Turns out the kid was from Wayzata, and a compulsive liar. Other than that, it’s been a pretty smooth trip.
TDT: Ok quick hitters…
TDT: Best College Campus?
AB: Texas
TDT: Prettiest Co-Eds?
AB: Georgia
TDT: Favorite Stadium?
AB: Ohio State
TDT: Best Tailgating Scene?
AB: Georgia
TDT: Best Food?
AB: Texas
TDT: Best Crowd Chants?
AB: Wisconsin
TDT: Best Fans?
AB: Ohio State
TDT: Worst/Most Hostile Fans?
AB: West Virginia
