Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

It's a bit terrifying to see people ranking Texas as #1.  Just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and with my luck it'll be against the hated Sooners on Saturday.

Still, it should be a heck of a fun game to watch!  I'll be there for the 34th time in my life, including 31 of the last 34.

At least they both matter.  That's cool.

Stacking up the SEC after Week 5: UGA football’s top contender emerges (usatoday.com)

Could be roughly correct, but really irrelevant, the brief summaries are maybe of use.

Thankfully, Texas is loaded up with large cities. Four of the top 10!

Of the rest, NYC is the kind of place I'd only suggest if you want to experience that kind of thing. LA is so spread out, meh (some parts are nice, but it's not a place you can take the real temp of). Chicago is like NY, but less. Also one with some intentionality of experience. Phoenix is nice enough. Never done Philly. San Diego is deeply nice, though might not have the highest high points.

Yeah, LA is a hard "city" to visit. Essentially it's the kind of place that you'd be more likely to come because there was some specific thing you wanted to see/do, and then build around from there. I.e. come for the Rose Bowl, or Disneyland, etc. But it's not a city you visit just to see the city IMHO. 

I do think San Diego is much better for that purpose. It's much more centralized and has quite a bit going on. And the downtown is on the water, so it's not like LA where you have to fight through horrific traffic to see a beach. 

I have mentioned before how we had a bad visit to New Orleans.  Usually I give a place a pass after one visit, but I really have zero interest in returning in this case.  And yes, maybe I should, but I won't.

It's best when you have a "local guide", a friend who has lived there and does live there.  I know here I could take you places and you'd think this is a S-hole, and other places and you'd think "This is much nicer than I expected."  I suspect that is broadly true.

Out of curiosity, what made it bad?

I tend to like that city, but it is by and large a very uneven place in terms of experience. In some ways even more so than most cities. (mostly because the place most people go is in someways very cool and in some ways a real tourist hell. And a lot of neighborhoods are downright sketchy)

When in Sunnyslope, you must go here:

GREEK TOWN RESTAURANT INC, Phoenix - North Mountain - Menu, Prices & Restaurant Reviews - Tripadvisor
GREEK TOWN RESTAURANT INC, Phoenix - North Mountain - Menu, Prices & Restaurant Reviews - Tripadvisor

LA really is an urban jungle. 
Streets crisscross and curl around and up the uneven terrain.  You could get lost very easily there. 

The weird thing about LA is that this is both correct and incorrect. Huge swaths of the LA area are just flat expanses with nicely gridded streets. But there are also large areas where you've got foothills and terrain, and of course the LA "basin" is called such because it's basically surrounded by mountains. 

(Diverging from LA to OC): My wife grew up in Long Beach, and had lived in Huntington Beach for 10 years before we met. In both places, the land is pretty flat and the streets are mostly straight. So you know where you are and where you're going, and everything's predictable. Then she moved in with me down here in Mission Viejo, where the terrain is very hilly so sight lines are impeded, roads snake in all sorts of different directions, and learning your way around is a chore because you may start out heading south and a mile later you're heading west, all on the same street. 

LA also made me think of a time I "discovered" a part of Phoenix I had never visited before, called Sunnyslope.  It's just a neighborhood/community that isn't on the way to anywhere, but I found myself in it one day.  LA probably has 70 of those places - parts of the city you'd just never experience because you never needed to.

Yeah, and to an extent this is one of the things that I said about larger metros offering a "richer" experience than smaller. Because there are so many people, there is more opportunity for enclaves with very unique feel to all exist within the same city. 

I used to be in LA for business pretty often, and I found the "grid" part to be very convenient.  Often the freeways were clogged and I could exit and drive pretty well on the streets.  Once you get into the hills that changes of course.

ATL doesn't have much of a grid anywhere outside downtown and a little in midtown.  The streets here often move "OK" when the freeway is clogged (which is most of the time with only one N/S freeway.