The infinite Syracuse football road trip diary: Notre Dame

Hoya Suxa is aiming to attend 10 of Syracuse's 12 regular season football games this year. He'll be filing short travelogues from his journeys.

My alarm clock started blaring at 5:30 in the morning. This is not a fake time of the day; there actually is a 5:30 in the morning and it is a miserable time to be both awake and alive. The only thing that should be happening at 5:30 in the morning is absolutely nothing, yet I was staggering around my apartment like warmed over garbage, doing final prep for what would likely be our largest tailgate of the season. If I had packed my dirty laundry into my cooler instead of piles of breakfast combustibles it would have been totally reasonable and likely the basis for a whole new tailgate menu paradigm. Humans should not keep farming hours if they are not farmers.

MetLife Stadium is only about 20 miles from my apartment and I've been there more than a dozen times for various efforts in not being a social misfit. Attempting to function before light emerges from the sun that L. Ron Hubbard's spaceship totes around the universe, though, is somewhat difficult: Instead of driving to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and cutting across Manhattan on the way to New Jersey, I, for reasons unknown, got in my Jeep and drove to Citi Field. Citi Field is nowhere near MetLife Stadium, nor is it a football stadium where football -- including the college variety -- is played. It didn't occur to me that driving to Citi Field instead of MetLife Stadium was dumb or the residue of suffering massive head trauma, but upon arrival at the wrong place in the wrong state, I quickly realized that I am a huge idiot and should not be allowed to do anything other than sit very still and focus on breathing quietly.

Once I managed to get to the Meadowlands -- within the same day! -- things materialized rapidly: We were an initial group of 11 that ballooned closer to 20 as the morning bled into the early afternoon. The noon start forced our hand into playing breakfast -- I am convinced that Big Egg is the shadowy cabal that is forcing all of these noon college football starts -- but that didn't stop us from turning deep-fried turkey into a 100%-certified breakfast meat.

America is definitely the number one place in the world to deep fry a turkey in a parking lot that was once a swamp and probably has a perma-layer of glowing green goo just under the topsoil. This is not an opinion; this is verified science.

In addition to the turkey -- man cannot live on fried turkey alone, although an enterprising person with a winning attitude could probably pull it off -- I prepared mufflettes, hash browns, and fruit kebabs. The mufflettes were of two varieties: Sausage and bacon and western, each cooked in small muffin pans that would deliver egg vessels teaming with all the necessary breakfast essentials. There is nothing particularly intense about mufflettes -- it's just a condensed omelette in a muffin tray coated in cooking spray -- but these sons of bitches came out with enough power to propel an average human to victory in a wrestling match with a bear.

The coming tornado of nooners will, once again, stretch our ability to diversify our tailgating portfolio, but the addition of mufflettes to the growing pile of grilled breakfast recipes has been a important discovery in the course of human volition.

1. This is the look of a man that knows that there's a non-zero chance that he poisons himself and all of his friends but will emerge victorious, getting by on only wit and guile (and propane and a spatula and a grill brush and tongs and other stuff). Looking like a guy that just found out that his favorite toilet bowl cleaner is back in stock at the grocery store is the expression necessary to achieve greatness over open flames.

2. The ol' thumbs up. That's how you let people know that "things are a go," that you've green-lit an especially awful pun, or if you want to indicate the direction in which you will push in someone's shit if they don't like the food that you're slinging down their face holes. A pro's-pro knows all about the thumbs up and uses it for more than aircraft marshalling.

3. Wearing an apron means that you believe that tailgate grilling is serious fucking business. Or it means that you're an amateur surgeon ready to lop off someone's foot and replace it with a go-kart wheel because that would be rad as hell.

4. A great tailgate master knows that you should dress in layers. If the weather changes you'll be ready. Also, it helps hide the fact that you're getting fatter by the second because you have the workout initiative of a corpse.

5. Only the finest sewer runoff goes in your mandatory beer holster. Putting a beer on a table is for suckers; putting it on your hip ensures that lining your stomach with nuclear acid is only a 12-ounce curl away.

Notre Dame has a deep football tradition: Winning one for the Gipper, Rudy, Touchdown Jesus, and, of course, doing Arkansas' Calling the Hogs while wearing a hockey jersey and threatening the known boundaries of being a Drunk Fat Guy:

Life is a rich tapestry.

Games Attended: 4
Syracuse's Record in Games Attended: 2-2 
Miles Driven: ~1,405
Miles Flown: 0
Next Syracuse Game: Wake Forest
Next Syracuse Game I'm Attending: Virginia Tech
Previous: Colgate; South Florida; Connecticut