Texans fans lament the loss of tailgating, energy on game day
With restrictions in place, a limited crowd watches from stands for first time this year
Across from NRG Stadium on Sunday, Jay Neff and two friends stood behind his pickup for a modest pregame tailgate before they entered the stadium for the first true Texans home game this season — the first game a reduced crowd was allowed to enjoy the action.
If it were a normal Sunday afternoon, the parking lots surrounding the stadium would be packed with tens of thousands of tailgaters, mingling and moving from tent to tent with plastic cups in hand, the smell of smoked barbecue wafting through the air. Instead, Neff and his buddies were relegated to a more discreet tailgate — opening a cooler of Modelos in the cab of his pickup.
“There’s normally a community of people (tailgating), you know?” Neff said. “So it’s a lot of going back and forth. I definitely think itwould be bad right now, or not help the situation at all.”
For the foreseeable future, or as long as the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt Greater Houston, this is what Texans game days are going to look like: minimal traffic, mostly empty stadiums, mask wearing and no tailgating.
The Texans received approval last week from Houston and Harris County officials to allow up to 13,300 fans into NRG Stadium for Sunday’s game against the Minnesota Vikings, albeit with a litany of restrictions. Any fan over the age of10mustwear a mask, unless they’re actively eating, both in the parking lot and inside the stadium. Fans are encouraged to take their temperature before arriving andmust answer a series of health-related questions before entering.
The team said it would reassess tailgating rules after the game, but there was a notable lack of the typical raucous en
ergy in the vast NRG Stadium complex, even as most fans able to attend on Sunday were just happy to watch football at the stadium again.
“At least I can say if they all get the corona and they postpone the football season fromnowon, I got to go to one live game,” said Candy Searcy of Montgomery, a season ticket holder decked out in a new Laremy Tunsil jersey. Searcy had in hand amask adorned with the Texans logo but was unconcerned about being in somewhat close proximity to people in a large indoor venue.
“I’m glad that this is a little bit of normalcy. I think we need that in our lives right now because they’ve taken somuch away from us,” she said.
Season ticket holders were given the option at the beginning of the season to either opt out of their ticket package for the season or purchase three-game, fourgame or seven-game packages. Tickets are being sold in “pods” of two, four, five and six seats. If a family of four buys tickets in a sixseat pod, the remaining two seats must go unsold to allow for social distancing.
For Jim and Susan Meinholz of Kingwood, this meant living with seats that had slightly worse sight lines than they are used to, but thatwasn’t the sacrifice that bothered them on Sunday. The Meinholzes normally have a tailgating group of six for every home game and lamented the loss of that tradition as season ticket holders since the Texans’ inaugural season in 2002.
“We can go to the grocery store, we can go to work, but we can’t tailgate,” Jim Meinholz said. “When you spend $125-150 a ticket, give us an opportunity to have
fun.”
Other fans were concerned about the lack of energy in the normally packed stadium, which seats up to 72,000 people, and wondered howthatwould impact the players on the field.
“It’s gonna be really bizarre, like extremely scary,” said Tonya Taylor, who strolled into the stadium wearing a Deshaun Watson jersey with her husband, Tim. “But I’m gonna enjoy the hell out of it anyway.”
Searcy noted that a downside
to the mostly empty, cavernous indoor stadium was that while her seats were great — an obstructed view 11 rows back from the field — she could hear a heckler the entire game.
“He had a sign, ‘Fire Bill O’Brien,’ ” Searcy said, referring to the Texans’ embattled coach and generalmanager. “He carried on pretty much through the whole game. That part wasn’t so good.”
While few fans wore masks in the parking lots or while walking
to the stadium entrances, some such as Marcos Castelan were happy to make that small concession if it meant being able to watch the game with peace of mind.
“It sucks wearing it, but at the same time, you don’t want other people getting sick. I don’t want to get sick,” Castelan said. “It’s not the end of the world.”
Even as the game-day aesthetic might be radically different, the conversation among fans about the winless Texans was business
as usual — praise for the dynamic quarterback Watson, complaints about a tough early schedule and acerbic vitriol for O’Brien, who has presided over consecutive disappointing seasons for the home team.
“We gotta get rid of Bill O’Brien, that’s a consensus,” Neff said, adding that if the Texans don’t pull out a win against the Vikings, “somebody better be in trouble tomorrow morning.”