Angel City Classic finale

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It was one of the stranger sights I’ve seen in all the years I have been covering sports.

And we’re talking about a lot of years.

There was the entire Fox Sports crew -- announcers, statisticians, cameramen, technical folks -- all standing around just watching the final five minutes of the Angel City Classic between Morehouse College and Prairie View A&M at the Coliseum on Saturday.

Why?

Because there was nothing for them to do. A neighborhood power outage had caused almost everything in the stadium to go black, from the lights in the press box to the scoreboard to the broadcast setup.

Even the elevator was dead, meaning we intrepid reporters had to go down 90 rows from press box to field level to get postgame interviews.

Not so bad.

Then we had to trudge back up those stairs to the 90th row.

Huffing and puffing bad.

Because it was still daylight, the crowd, an announced 52,000 plus, was only mildly inconvenienced by the loss of the scoreboard and the video replays.

Imagine if it had been a night game.

Even worse, imagine if USC had played a night game there with a crowd in excess of 93,000 and the place have gone dark.

That could have been ugly.

Unless, of course, the Trojans were playing Oregon State. In which case they might have deliberately blown a transformer themselves.

-- Steve Springer