Giant Pizza Tower At UTEP-Rice Game Provides Harrowing Moments

If you weren't watching Thursday night's epic showdown between UTEP and Rice, you missed one of the great pizza box journeys of our lifetime.

That's right. Pizza. Box. Journey.

Our epic tale takes place in the stands, where a few fans decided to see just how many pizza boxes they could stack on each other before the whole thing toppled. A Pizza Tower, if you will.

This appears to be in the student section, and took place during the entire third quarter. I don't know why it started, don't know who's idea it was, and I don't know if this is some sort of Rice tradition, but I am HERE for it.

Behold. The Leaning Tower of Pizza:

Fans stack pizza boxes during Rice-UTEP game

Amazing. Jaw-dropping stuff, really.

Anyone want to count how many boxes? No? Just me? OK!

Let's see ... 1, 2, 3, 4 .... 70.

I think I count roughly 70 pizza boxes here, give or take a couple (or 10). If you notice, the timestamp on the scoring monitor here says we're about seven minutes into the third quarter.

These heroes obviously didn't start building this tower then, so let's assume this started around ... halftime? Maybe somewhere in the second quarter?

Who knows, but the craftsmanship in itself is truly impressive.

Giant pizza tower in UTEP-Rice college football game.

Of course, all good things must come to an end. Gravity just simply won't allow it.

Our saga ends when the buzzer sounds at the end of the third.

Devastating. All that hard work for nothing.

Now, one Twitter Sleuth seems to think the kiddos were told to knock this puppy down because it was a safety violation.

Not sure I buy that or what the violation would be, but you can see the guy intentionally knock down the rest of the boxes after the initial collapse.

Was it out of frustration? Who knows. We probably never will.

Regardless, don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. Job well done.