The Dreadful Brown Football Experience - Carbone

The Dreadful Brown Football Experience - Carbone

A couple of years ago, Brown football at least lost in entertaining fashion -- high scores, no defense, but usually a score to keep it close.

This year, they're just inept.

Brown also managed to make the games less fun. They boarded up the ticket windows on the home side of the field, and make you download an app that none of the ticket takers know how to access, in order to enter. 

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Or you can walk around to the visitors' side, pay a ticket taker, and wait while a slow printer chunks out a bar code.

They did away with Frenchy's Popcorn cart -- no candied apples.

They closed two concession windows creating long lines for a very limited menu -- basically chicken nuggets and fries. It's unbelievable, the food the menu they offer in 2021 -- not a healthy choice on it.

With limited exceptions, they play loud, canned music instead of letting their school band play.

They've killed -- or allowed to die -- the green ivy crawling up the home stands. With the dead leaves and plywood boarded windows, this once beautifully retro stadium looks forlorn. You can't eat, enjoy the band, or even get in easily.

You can overlook an inept team for an enjoyable fan experience, or a winning team will make you forgive long lines for bad food and an annoying soundtrack.

But the Brown athletic department has managed to deliver the worst of both worlds. After the URI game, I don't look forward to going back.

(And the announcing team that replaced Scott Cordischi was embarrassingly unprepared and unprofessional. Nice people I'm sure, real fans of the team, but basically any two guys without insight into the team or the game.)
 

Gerald M. Carbone was a journalist for twenty-five years, mostly for the Providence Journal and has been recognized as an expert on the life of Nathanael Greene by various historical societies.

He has won two of American journalism's most prestigious prizes--the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award and a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University.

He earned a Master's Degree from Brown University and lives in Warwick, Rhode Island.