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College Football Arrives
9/1/05
by Clay

Remember the halycon days of yesteryear when the return of college football meant waking up early to drink beers at the tailgate, watching College Gameday on televisions set up in the back of trucks, hanging out with attractive girls who were impressed when you won (or lost) a beer shotgunning contest, and rooting on your team to a college national championship? Hopefully you do, because I don't. That's despite being born and raised a southerner and a University of Tennessee football fan on top of that. Instead of these days of excess and autumnal splendor, I spent most of my college Saturdays in Washington, D.C. praying that the Big East "game of the week" (an eternal and neverending oxymoron) wouldn't cancel out the SEC game of the week on CBS.

Upon graduation I traveled back home to attend law school at the least SEC-worthy of SEC schools, Vanderbilt. While here, I witnessed Vanderbilt consistently snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. At the same time, students from other SEC schools constantly arrived at Vandy's stadium and taunted the Vandy students because their schools were superior on the football field. Sometimes these taunting fits erupted into physical violence, but usually Vandy men were smart enough not to engage in arguments about football teams. This was for three primary reasons, 1. because the other guys were always bigger 2. because the other guys were always willing to kill if their teams were insulted 3. the other guys were right. I suspect this might be the hard and fast rule for determining if someone is actually a southern male or not. To whit, if someone says to you, "(Insert team name here) is a bunch of pussies and so are all their fans," and you do not contemplate some act of physical violence, then you are not a southern male. Smart southern males can be easily distinguished from this subset because they are the guys standing farther away from the conflict whispering jokes to their friends.

I say all this to reach this point, somehow, once you leave college, the success or failure of your college team becomes more important than it ever was when you were in college. I have several reasons why this is the case:

1. Because you work now.

That is all. This is the reason.

When you are in college, so your team lost, big deal. There will always be another game and now there are tons of other things to do. Somehow being in math for dummies with all the sorority girls on Monday assuages the pain of a football loss much more than being in an office working on TPS reports. And that's just on Monday. It doesn't even consider the parties going on Saturday night win or lose or sleeping into the afternoon start of NFL football games and waking up to look at the pictures of girls dancing on bars in skirts you took the night before on your digital camera. This is because for college kids football games are just a fringe benefit of their lives whereas for many southern football fans, college football games are their lives. If you doubt this at all, arrive at any SEC football stadium one hour before the start of the game. I guarantee you that the football stadium will be over half full. Arrive within one-half hour of kickoff and you are late...except for the student section where kids come strolling fresh from pregame parties. For working adults the loss festers because they have nothing else to look forward to during the week. Moreover they have to think about this loss during the long slog back to whatever hamlet they call home during the week.

Pretty soon these adult fans are on the message board calling for some coach to be fired or labeling a college kid's effort shameful with brave names like the Volinator or Bayougatorwrestler. I have no doubt that many college football fans care far more about winning or losing than the players do, but I suspect this is because if UT's quarterback doesn't win a game he can still play pick the sorority sleepover. Odds are the Volinator can't. (In fact, if we had two things on this website, 1. a readership and 2. female readers, I'd like to test a hypothesis, any woman who goes on a message board with a name like Dawgonehottie will immediately set the message board world into a tizzie. Seriously. The message board universe has zero women. You'd think most of these guys have never talked to a woman. In fact if anyone is interested in trying this, we can have our first deadlyhippos experiment and gauge reactions.)

But all this has been a long digression about the upcoming college football season. Even with all its excesses and misplaced priorities, there is no better sport in all the world than college football. Let's enjoy the ride.

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