I can’t imagine any college town being nicer than Westwood. It’s all pretty upscale and situated about two minutes from Beverly Hills and Bel-Air - not a bad location for a school. You can get any sort of nice meal or product within five minutes of the UCLA campus, which while nice, is a little weird at the same time.

UCLA’s campus is pretty spotless, the buildings are new, there’s plenty of quad area, solid food options in big unions, and basically just a generally comfortable place.

While the Bruins play their home games in the Rose Bowl, which is as huge a stadium as it gets (outside of the Big House), the excitement of gameday isn’t nearly what it is at other places. Maybe it’s because the tailgating and activity is so spread out across a parking lot and huge golf course (which doubles as public parking), or possibly the fact that campus is nowhere near Pasadena, where the bowl is (hurting student attendance), or it could just be that UCLA isn’t as good as they’ve been during other recent years.

Everybody I talked to was excited about the game and excited to be out on a nice southern California day, but there wasn’t the same electricity in Pasadena as there have been in other places. Really, though, in the general parking area, it was more of a picnic, which is fine. I wouldn’t at all mind tailgating on well-manicured grass in some shade, it just may not be the best place to go to a game if you look forward to a loud, boisterous gameday experience. Make no mistake, there were pockets of people having as good a time as anybody else I’ve seen so far, but yeah, there was more wine and cheese than should ever be at a tailgate, but what’re you gonna do? It’s LA. Enjoy the episode.