The Rose Bowl was full. The two corners of the Bowl I use to guess attendance (sunny side, upper corner farthest from the field, north and south) were full for the first time all season. One tarp was down (basically, the one on the far right in the south end zone, over the players' tunnel) and where it had been was full. Sure, there were a bunch of empty prime seats (50-30 yard lines at field level, north end) on the shady side, but they were the only block of empty seats I could see.
The Bowl emptied out at halftime. I was concerned that many would not return. No reason to be worried. As far as I could see, the crowd all came back for the third quarter. Only a few stragglers got up to go. What I heard in the stands at the 40 on the sunny side was concern about how long it would take to get off the golf course after the game. A number of people around me had driven up from Orange County in the rain to be there.
Dieffenbach is a tall guy. It was hard on the sunny side of the Bowl to miss him sprinting out of the tunnel to join his teammates in the third quarter. The crowd saw that and rose to support and recognize him, even before the Bowl's video crew could put anything up on the scoreboard. In fifty years at Bruin football games, I had never seen anything like that.
Maybe just maybe LA is waking up to something special in the Arroyo Seco? Maybe just maybe there will be a lot more tarps that go missing in two weeks?
It sounds like Bob Chesney got the message we fans who were physically soaked but whose spirits were undampened were trying to send. See below.