It's The Most WONDERFUL Time Of The Year...

I know I'm going to get a hard time for this.  But so be it.  I'm going to put myself out there and say that college football is the greatest game in the world.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  I love hockey.  At all levels.  I've even been known to enjoy a soccer game my son IS NOT playing in.

But college football is the best.

I know, America's Pastime is, or was Baseball.  Let's face it.  The NFL rules now.  Even NASCAR, which used to be only limited to people from the south who actually KNEW where, "Moonshine" came from, cared about that sport.  Now, you have stadiums of 200K Rednecks, watching a bunch of other Rednecks in fast cars make 1500 left turns in an afternoon, and waiting for someone you are NOT rooting for to crash into a bunch of other guys you're not rooting for so the guy you ARE rooting for, can win!

I understand the attraction to the NFL.  It's pretty glamorous.  But there are problems with it.  It's pretty, "mercenary" any more.  When I was a kid, a guy would spend his whole career with one team.  Now?  Not so much.  You get drafted out of college, you spend three or four years with a team and have a great career.  Even win a, Super Bowl!  Little kids in town are buying your replica jerseys!  They clamor for your autograph!  You are a local hero!  How could life get any better?

Well, if they offer you more money to play in Cleveland?  THAT could be better.  I don't like that.

And guys who have no reason to like the Miami Dolphins, or Dallas Cowboys (ESPECIALLY, the Dallas Cowboys) LOVE those teams!  They live and die with the Pittsburgh Steeler's, but they have never been east of Denver?  WFT?  That isn't loyalty.  That's trying to always pick a winner.

I find that folks who are college football fans are so, because they WENT to that college.  And that instills some loyalty, even when your team sucks.  I know a guy who lives in Utah and still has season tickets to Maryland, and flies back every week in the fall to watch his team with his brother who also went there.  Because that was his school and he PLAYED college football there.

That last part is NOT required to fanatical.  But I'm sure it helps.

How much do you have to love your college when they suck as much as Maryland, or Indiana, or Duke, or Vanderbilt, or Kentucky, the list is endless, to do stuff like that?

Now, THIS kind of loyalty is not always the case.  Notre Dame fans who did NOT go to Notre Dame, and BYU fans who did not GO TO BYU are the WORST kind of college football fans!

Yes, Jerry and Todd, I'm talking about YOU!  Just live with it.

If you live in Provo and all you know is BYU football?  OK.  If you live in Chicago and all you know is Notre Dame?  OK.  Hell, I was born in West Virginia, so I root for them.  But BOTH of my parents went to school there!  So I have a reason.

But blind loyalty to a religious school is, in my humble opinion, misguided.  If not totally wrong.

I know somewhere there is a college with a football team called, Presbyterian.  I was raised one, but I wouldn't root for them.  Even if I knew where they were!  Seems silly.

OK, I told you all THAT to tell you THIS.

My wife asked me tonight, what I was going to watch.  And I told her I was going to watch, Florida Atlantic @ Eastern Carolina.  Then later, on the PAC 12 Network, I was going to watch Sacramento State @ Arizona State.  And she said, "Why?"

I told her... no I didn't, I just thought it for a few seconds, but I THOUGHT about saying it.  Then moving out:  "Cause it's college football.  And I love college football, you know this.  How many trips have we taken over the last 30 years to places you wanted to see, because there was a Utah game there?"  Would you have EVER wanted to see Ann Arbor Michigan if the Utes didn't play there?  New Orleans?  Tucson? Ft. Collin's, Colorado?  Laramie, "FREAKING" Wyoming?  Corvallis, Oregon?  Eugene, Oregon?.......

The list is endless.

What I really said was, "I like college football!"

Then she said, (and she REALLY said this.  I shit you not...), "I can't imagine anything more irrelevant to my life than teams from Florida Atlantic and Easter Carolina playing football!  And you watch this all fall!"

To which I replied, "Says the woman who spends 40 hours a week watching re-runs of, NCIS, CSI: Panguich, Las Vegas, New York and Provo, The Mentalist, The Good Wife, The Big Bang Theory, Two And A Half Men, Hawaii Five-O and any show about finding serial killers and child kidnappers, like you didn't get enough of ALL of that at WORK for 20 years?!"

Her reply was, "NO I DON'T!" and to walk into the bedroom and turn on the TV.

College Football one, network gibberish zero.

So, I'm in the dog house (what else is new?)  But it doesn't matter.  It's college football season, and it's great.

Saturday night, I told her I was enjoying having all the college football so much, that I might just order the NHL Center Ice package again, since I loved watching all the Redwings games with the local guys doing the game.

She said, "So, you're telling me you're not leaving the house until June?"  Pretty much.

Oh, we'll go to Belize and Mexico.  As long as it's after the Bowl Game are over, and they have ESPN on the, "dish" down there.

Is there a college game on Friday this week?  Just asking...