The trick I've learned with road trips is to book fun stuff outside of the actual football game. The game is the potential cherry on top, not the objective of the trip. If the game turns out well, the trip is awesome. If the game goes poorly, the trip is still awesome even though the game sucked.

Thank you Cougars, for the very, very awful Oregon and West Virginia games, which taught me the value of my current approach.

By the time I reached my seats at Baylor this year, we'd enjoyed showing our friends around New Orleans, and they were already raving about the best Tex-Mex and BBQ meals they'd ever had.