BYU arrives at storied Super Dome

The Cougars slowly walked into the Superdome about 40 minutes ago. The first BYU person inside was defensive coordinator Jaime Hill, who had his Ipod buds in his ear. Harvey Unga came in with his music and it didn’t take him long to start dancing.

Tulane’s players arrive after the Cougars and head coach Bob Toledo was right, his players looked a lot younger and smaller than the Cougars. Less mature?

The Cougars had a three-hour delay at the Provo airport. Apparently JetBlue brought the aircraft from California where it was loaded with fuel. When it got to Provo to pickup the Cougar team, it had something like 6,000 pounds too much fuel onboard. With the full team weight, plus equipment, that put the plane too heavy for takeoff from the shorter Provo Airport.

The airport folks had to bring in some trucks and pump the excess fuel out of the plane so it would meet requirements for takeoff. That would have to be a lot of fun since the flight was a semi-long one to New Orleans.

No word yet if Harvey Unga will play in this game.

This is a beautiful facilty, a storied place that has hosted NCAA Final Fours and plenty of great moments in the NFL not to mention the victims of the disaster a few years ago. This place was trashed when victims lived here for a short time and they had to replace seats and the roof.

Right now, it is very cool inside while it is sultry and humid outside. A security guard told me it would not ordinarily be this cool inside the arena and it certainly was not this cool last week for the Tulane-Tulsa game. But with the Saints playing host to the Lions on Sunday, they started cranking up the cool units early so it would be ready for the Sunday kickoff.

Cool.