Even a late-spring snowstorm couldn’t keep University of Colorado football fans from packing the house to get a first look at the program’s new head coach Deion Sanders and his revamped squad in action at the team’s annual spring game.
An announced crowd of 47,277 fans — who each paid $10 a ticket and also had to clean the several inches of overnight snow from their seats — cheered as “Coach Prime” put the new-look Buffs through their paces in a controlled scrimmage. One of the bright spots for fans who last year endured a 1-11 season was their new starting quarterback, Shedeur Sanders, who followed his father to Colorado from Jackson State University. The younger Sanders looked sharp in leading the No. 1 team of CU’s offense, including a TD toss to CU’s new two-way player (receiver and cornerback) Travis Hunter, another former Jackson State player.
From a fan-experience perspective the public Wi-Fi network installed a few years ago was in good shape, with solid results in the 70-80 Mbps range for download speeds and 50-60 Mbps range for upload speed in the stands and in the main concourse on the stadium’s east side. The wireless champ for the day, however, was a Verizon 5G ultra wideband cellular connection we picked up in the east side concourse, which returned a speed test of 198 Mbps download and 17.9 Mbps on the upload.
Concessions operations looked the same as they had been in the past, with portable stands as well as several belly-up stands on the east side and a large dual walk-through area inside the fieldhouse which adjoins the stadium’s west side. At all places transactions were handled by staffers, though in some spots they had flip-screen terminals to speed processing. Barker vendors (mainly selling beer) were using handheld credit-card processors, which were a bit challenging for some in the just-above-freezing conditions.
Still, the operations crew did well to staff up for an unusually large springtime crowd, since in the past Colorado spring games have only attracted a scattering of diehards. Last year, the CU spring game only had 1,950 in attendance.
