Louisiana's Frustrated Residents (VIDEO)

What the Bayou Classic Means

Lemme break it down for you:
There's this biiiig Battle of the Bands every Thanksgiving weekend.
It's called the State Farm Bayou Classic. Publicly it's the annual college football game between the Grambling State University Tigers and the Southern University Jaguars.
In practice it is the largest family reunion in the United States, with upwards of 200,000 visitors to the city to meet, greet, eat, celebrate annually.
You meet up with old classmates, distant relatives, former colleagues and neighbors and more importantly you get reaquainted with dear, old Nola.
The Classic was first held in 1974 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, Louisiana. Since 1978 the game has been held the final Saturday in November at the Louisiana Superdome. A Waterford crystal trophy is awarded to the winning school.
The game has had State Farm Insurance as its primary sponsor since 1996.
Southern leads the series 17-16, and claims the longest winning streak, 8 games from 1993-2000.
It is the best known game and rivalry in historically black college football and is televised by NBC, which i spoke of in an earlier post. The Bayou Classic is the only NCAA Division I - Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA) game to be shown nationally on broadcast television.
Both schools typically forego Division I-AA playoff elegibility to participate in the lucrative Bayou Classic.
Like I said, before the actual football game is just a formality. The most well-known and well-attended is the Battle Of The Bands, where both schools' marching bands (the Grambling State University Tiger Marching Band and the Southern University Marching Band, also known as the Human Jukebox) stage elaborately choreographed performances at halftime and before and following the game.

The Classic was the biggest stage for college football's biggest name at one time, Grambling coach the late Eddie Robinson. He was literally a Tiger, the winningest coach in college football history when he retired. Super Bowl winning quarterback Doug Williams succeeded Robinson as Grambling coach before going to the front office of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he started his NFL career.
The success of the Bayou Classic is a major source of tourism revenue to the city of New Orleans, and has inspired the promotion of numerous other HBCU rivalries as "Classics", often played at neutral sites in distant cities.

Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, organizers moved the 2005 event from the Superdome to Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas, where many of New Orleans' evacuees were living.
The 2006 Bayou Classic returned to the Superdome in New Orleans. This year marks the second year in a row the Classic has returned to its rightful home. Enjoy the game.

"At the Macy's parade ... they gotta get the dancers from Broadway shows out in the streets. In New Orleans the musicians are already in the streets"

NEW YORK (AP) — We just heard from AP that David Simon, who has made the streets of Baltimore famous with gritty television dramas such as "The Wire," "Homicide: Life on the Street," and "The Corner," mow wants to take on the Big Easy.
The next series he hopes to produce for HBO is about musicians reconstituting their lives in New Orleans, he told The New Yorker for its issue hitting newsstands Monday.
Simon has been spending time there researching the music scene.
"This show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter," Simon said. "'The Wire' has never done that. I certainly never said or wanted to say that Baltimore is not worth saving, or that it can't be saved. But I think some people watching the show think, Why don't they just move away?"
A goal of the show will be to celebrate the glories of an American city, and "why we need to accept ourselves as an urban people," Simon said.
"At the Macy's parade, when they show New York, they gotta get the dancers from Broadway shows out in the streets doing a kick line," he said. "In New Orleans the musicians are already in the streets."
The fifth and final season of HBO's "The Wire" begins in January, this time focusing on layoffs at The Sun — where Simon once worked — and how newspapers fail to capture certain complex truths. Previous seasons of the acclaimed drama have featured drug dealers, struggling longshoremen, city politicians and inner-city students.
The drama is actually about "the decline of the American empire" and the failure of postmodern institutions, Simon said. He is also working on an HBO miniseries called "Generation Kill," based on the 2004 book, about a Marine platoon in Iraq.