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You may think that I’m going to explore the unsettling angst of college football fans who've just watched their star recruit tear his ACL on the opening play of summer practice. Nah, those type of setbacks are merely “flesh wounds” and are recoverable by careful rehab. What I’m talking about is unrecoverable college football quality time, resulting in mental train wrecks that can only be caused by a higher power – completely unavoidable and unmanageable by the focused fan. So without any further ado, following are the top ten fears (in no particular order) of any college football fan…
1) Weddings
It goes without saying that this invite is not from one of your true friends. It would be against any one of your friends’ principles to plan (or have his/her spouse plan) a wedding on an autumn Saturday. No, this is your significant other’s friend. This is the individual (man or woman) who believes college football is “just a game” and that wedding pictures would “look so pretty” in an autumn setting. Well, I guess college football is just a game. Just a game that you’ve had marked on your calendar since January 4. This meaningless game is the sole reason you were able to survive another long summer of boring baseball games and Tiger Woods-dominated golf events. In addition, wedding pictures don’t look good when all the groomsmen (or entire wedding parties, in most of the South) are pissed off. The last time I had this fear realized was back in October of 1999 when, by the grace of Touchdown Jesus, I was lucky enough between the wedding and the reception to catch a live glimpse of Shaun Alexander’s two late touchdown scampers in the Tide’s overtime upset victory over the mighty Gators. Oh yeah, I’d much prefer to join in the celebration of two people’s love rather than suffer through a 4-hour war that'll be the talk of college football fans for years. Moral of the story: If you must get married anywhere from September to December, then, for the love of John Heisman, PLEASE do it on a Friday. This is one of the worst kind of fears because you know that everyone else is hearing Ron Franklin’s sweet intro to a Saturday night ESPN telecast while your sorry ass is waiting your turn in the receiving line. Simply disturbing.
2) Birthday Parties (and other meaningless gatherings)
You’re invited to your 2-year-old niece/nephew’s birthday party. You skipped this party last year (before theinfant could walk) because it fell on the third Saturday in September and the Tennessee/Florida game was pitting two of the top-five teams in the nation. The kid isn’t even going to remember whether you attended the party. You just want to hear—on Sunday—that your niece/nephew loved the Blues Clues video you splurged on, with the money you would rather have spent on the latest edition of the College Football Encyclopedia that you’ve had your eye on for the past few weeks. You’d gladly choose beer and chips overice cream and cake, and the only thing you care about seeing unwrapped is the tin foil that’s covering your sub sandwich, which has been on your mind since Chris, Lee, and Kirk aired earlier that morning. You’d prefer to immerse yourself in your own “war room environment” because you want to be able to whistle the CBS college football theme song rather than sing that damn “Happy Birthday to You” melody. In this perilous situation, you can only hope that one of your relatives at the party shares your “illness” and you wind up huddled around the 13-inch television in your in-law’s kitchen. Happy birthday to you.
3) National “Breaking” News Reports
For it is written in the college football fan’s “Ten Commandments of Network Television”…Commandment number one states that breaking news stories should be flashed, in scrolled fashion, across the bottom of your television screen. You believe that if the current–events-thirsty viewers want to learn more, they can switch to one of the other networks that have conveniently interrupted a syndicated Friends episode to show the live footage and interviews from the news-breaking scene. The college football-crazed lunatic doesn’t want to miss the 3rd and goal, early fourth-quarter play that will determine whether Frank Solich is going to attempt a field goal, run the option, or run a 4th-and-goal play action to his reliable tight-end, who is coming clear of an inadvertent pick off the opposing linebacker. Only a college football fan realizes that the Nebraska players aren’t going to wait for Peter Jennings’ repetitive babble and the TV producer’s less-than-creative still photos of the news story centerpiece. You can only take solace in the fact that the rest of the nation shares your anguish. Only the 77,600 ticket holders in Memorial Stadium are immune to this network faux pas. Meanwhile, the game continues while the football fan catatonically sits through the first few seconds of the breaking news update before launching his final chicken wing in a rage that splashes Louisiana Hot Sauce all over his JVC.
4) Severe Weather
Thunderstorms, hail storms, tornadoes, strong winds, ice storms. If any one of these meteorological pitfalls happens to occur over the course of a college football Saturday, it can be the kryptonite of any digital cable or satellite system’s super-capabilities. We all pay homage to the god who created the ABC/ESPN Gameplan, and the college football disciple realizes that $89.99 is mere “chump change” when presented with the opportunity to watch at least twenty different games on a given Saturday. Heaven forbid that one of the football gods might mention to Mother Nature that she’s having a bad hair day, which will surely cause your satellite dish or cable system to succumb to her powers. This tragic weather-induced phenomenon has yet to bring me to my knees. However, the paranoid mind cannot escape the urge to tune into the Weather Channel on a Friday night. Visions of pigskins, rivalry games, fourth-quarter comebacks, and USC cheerleaders dance through my head like sugarplums and lollipops when I know that the local forecast for Saturday calls for clear skies.
5) Your Child’s Soccer Game
Eventually, all of us must grow up (to some extent). We joke about the possibility that our kid’s soccer game (or any youth sport, for that matter) may share the same time slot with a Texas-Oklahoma Red River War. We say that there’s no way we’d miss the focal point of the Texas State Fair to watch a bunch of second-graders run around in a herd-like fashion and kick one another’s shins. Let’s not kid ourselves (no pun intended). We’ll just have to bring our headphones to the soccer game and hope that little Johnny’s/Susie’s mom or dad doesn’t try to bend our ear about the upcoming PTA meeting next Tuesday night. Truth be told, we love our children more than college football, but we go to church to pray that we may never have to decide between the two. For we all know that an error during moral “crunch time” may cause a judge to rule that we see our kids only on the second and fourth weekends of each month for the rest of our lives. A small “sacrifice” is necessary here unless we want our children to end up choosing to live in a tool shed in Montana and write paranoid anti-government manifestos. Although, if I were a betting man, I’d have to guess that Mr. Kaczynski probably didn’t teach little Teddy to appreciate the beauty of college football.
6) Local “Breaking” News Reports
This fear falls along the same lines of Fear #3, but it is far more severe in the sense that you now realize that the entire nation is enjoying the game except for your po-dunk town of Hooterville, Kansas (Brian Billick reference). Local breaking news stories always scare me because, generally, your local affiliate has no regard for the events outside your hometown, obviously including a Miami-Florida State game. The most frightening aspect of local break-ins is the fact that all the news anchors are looking out for number one. Do you think that your local affiliate cares that the FSU field goal unit is lining up the game-tying effort? “Heavens, no!” Coach Bowden would say. This local network invariably has some young gun with stars in his/her eyes who will spare no minor news details in the hopes that an interview with the fireman who rescued a cat from a tree will propel him/her to passage on the money train to network television boarded by the likes of Bernard Shaw (CNN) and Arthur Kent (a.k.a. Scud Stud). Spare us the meaningless details, you college football home wrecker. Just get me back to the game so that I can see Bobby Bowden’s reaction to an inevitable date with a national championship showdown—or another ho-hum top-five finish in the final polls. Dad-gummit.
7) Your Job (The boss asks you to work on an autumn Saturday)
You have only three options. You can either quit, be fired for not showing up, or fabricate a well-constructed fairy tale. Your boss has placed you in a scenario that leaves you no option. It’s October 5, the first significant week of conference play, and you can either tell your boss that you would either love to come into work and help your shareholders garner a yearly $32.45 dividend or tell The Man to “screw off” and plant your happy tush in front of the TV as Ron Zook travels to Eli’s empire, Ralphie welcomes Willie the Wildcat, and Carson Palmer’s Trojans face off against Jason Gesser’s Cougars. Unique from all the other fears, this one leaves you an excuse without the burden of a supposedly foolproof lie or a burdensome alibi. You just have to be prepared. My personal experiences led me down this yellow-brick road a few times while I was a rookie in the corporate mayhem of big business. Any number of excuses will suffice as long as you practice your fabricated tales. Your boss asks, “Would it be possible for you to come into the office and help us sort through the XYZ account mess?” You reply, “I’d love to, but…” (a) “…it’s the first weekend in October, and I need to help my cousin harvest the pumpkins from his pumpkin patch,” or (b) “…daylight savings time ends in 3 weeks, and I need time to practice for the extra “party hour” that I’ll gain on October 26,” or (c) “…I’ll be hung over on Saturday because the BYU/Utah State game is on Friday night, and my buddies and I slam a beer each time a passing play is called.” Okay, so these excuses may have some holes. But you’re a college football fan (you may have even graduated in 6 years), and your livelihood depends on the occasional well-constructed fairy tale.
8) The Holiday Office Party (falling on championship weekend)
It never fails. You love the conference championship games, but unless you have tickets to Atlanta or Houston (or the MAC title game), you stand unguarded from the evils of the holiday office party. What college football fan wouldn’t want to watch a championship game that may very well determine who plays in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl? Hey, don’t complain. At least you get to see the Army/Navy classic, the MAC championship, and the first three quarters of the Hokie-Hurricane and Bruin-Cougar match-ups. Not good enough for you? Me neither. So plan now to devise a foolproof reason why you won’t be able to attend the party. Telling the office party coordinator that you’re scheduled to stand in front of the local supermarket, ringing a bell and dressed in a Santa Claus suit, all while you’re taking donations for the Salvation Army’s Tree of Lights campaign is nothing of which to be ashamed. Whatever it takes. You may burn in the depths of Hades and be confined to watching ESPN Classic footage of the women’s NCAA basketball tourney, but at least you sold your soul for some quality college football. In the end, you’ll feel vindicated knowing that you’re the only employee in your office who didn’t get wasted and hit on your boss’s 17-year-old daughter. (That would be a good thing in case you’re wondering.)
9) You Forgot the Tickets
You are a genius, my friend. Only you, a true master of foresight, would have the wherewithal to store the tickets inside the lucky jacket you always wear to games in late October. However, an unseasonably balmy Saturday, combined with your tight gameday schedule, results in your heading out the front door with your flask, tailgating paraphernalia, and windbreaker—without a trace in sight of that lucky winter coat. You and three buddies embark on a 2-hour road trip back to your college town and are just 10 minutes from your alma mater’s campus when you discover a sinking feeling inside your college football-craving belly. The conversation with your pal sitting in the front passenger’s seat comes to a screeching halt as you realize that it’s less than 1 hour until kickoff and there’s no time to return for the tickets with the hope of seeing any play from the first half. As your mental flatulence dawns on him, one of your buddies lets out a scream that would make Chewbacca’s wail seem suitable for a Sunday church choir. You recover from several neck contusions delivered from the angry backseat fans and can only hope and pray that some reasonable scalper (there’s an oxymoron for you) will have four tickets and a heart the size of Santa Claus. Otherwise, it looks to be an expensive afternoon, as you’ll be picking up the tab at the ol’ campus sports bar, with enough microbrew and appetizers to help soothe the angst of your three newest enemies.
10) Your Internet Server is Down
Any true college football fan has been forced to listen over the Internet to a game that has fallen through the cracks of a television broadcast. The true collegiate pigskin-head can appreciate games from even the “smallest-profile” conferences. As you attempt to log onto the Middle Tennessee State radio feed, you eagerly anticipate the fourth quarter of the MTSU/North Texas match-up that will determine a berth in the New Orleans Bowl. In addition, all serious fans on the mainland want to hear whether Tommy Chang can lead the Rainbow Warriors past Luke McCown’s Bulldogs, even if our PC clocks are ticking slowly into the wee hours of Sunday morning. C’mon, don’t snicker. Games like these make college football great. And if the shortsighted knuckleheads at the television networks can’t come through for us, then surely the Internet age will save our hides. However, all the best computer geeks in the world are unable to free us from the despair that occurs when our PC monitor tells us that our servers are taking lunch (or a midnight snack) at the local Waffle House. As we pound our mouses into submission and curse the name of Bill Gates, we are left defenseless against the powers of modern technology. Even though we settled for the latest Sun Belt scores from the ESPN bottom line broadcasted earlier in the day, we decide against watching highlights of the World’s Strongest Man Competition just to follow those late-night WAC games. We instead go to bed wondering whether all the planets will align and propel our favorite small conference team to the top of the conference standings. As we awake on Sunday and anxiously wait for the ESPN2 ticker to post those late non-televised scores, we are reminded that it’s not easy being a college football fan.
You may think that I’m going to explore the unsettling angst of college football fans who've just watched their star recruit tear his ACL on the opening play of summer practice. Nah, those type of setbacks are merely “flesh wounds” and are recoverable by careful rehab. What I’m talking about is unrecoverable college football quality time, resulting in mental train wrecks that can only be caused by a higher power – completely unavoidable and unmanageable by the focused fan. So without any further ado, following are the top ten fears (in no particular order) of any college football fan…
1) Weddings
It goes without saying that this invite is not from one of your true friends. It would be against any one of your friends’ principles to plan (or have his/her spouse plan) a wedding on an autumn Saturday. No, this is your significant other’s friend. This is the individual (man or woman) who believes college football is “just a game” and that wedding pictures would “look so pretty” in an autumn setting. Well, I guess college football is just a game. Just a game that you’ve had marked on your calendar since January 4. This meaningless game is the sole reason you were able to survive another long summer of boring baseball games and Tiger Woods-dominated golf events. In addition, wedding pictures don’t look good when all the groomsmen (or entire wedding parties, in most of the South) are pissed off. The last time I had this fear realized was back in October of 1999 when, by the grace of Touchdown Jesus, I was lucky enough between the wedding and the reception to catch a live glimpse of Shaun Alexander’s two late touchdown scampers in the Tide’s overtime upset victory over the mighty Gators. Oh yeah, I’d much prefer to join in the celebration of two people’s love rather than suffer through a 4-hour war that'll be the talk of college football fans for years. Moral of the story: If you must get married anywhere from September to December, then, for the love of John Heisman, PLEASE do it on a Friday. This is one of the worst kind of fears because you know that everyone else is hearing Ron Franklin’s sweet intro to a Saturday night ESPN telecast while your sorry ass is waiting your turn in the receiving line. Simply disturbing.
2) Birthday Parties (and other meaningless gatherings)
You’re invited to your 2-year-old niece/nephew’s birthday party. You skipped this party last year (before theinfant could walk) because it fell on the third Saturday in September and the Tennessee/Florida game was pitting two of the top-five teams in the nation. The kid isn’t even going to remember whether you attended the party. You just want to hear—on Sunday—that your niece/nephew loved the Blues Clues video you splurged on, with the money you would rather have spent on the latest edition of the College Football Encyclopedia that you’ve had your eye on for the past few weeks. You’d gladly choose beer and chips overice cream and cake, and the only thing you care about seeing unwrapped is the tin foil that’s covering your sub sandwich, which has been on your mind since Chris, Lee, and Kirk aired earlier that morning. You’d prefer to immerse yourself in your own “war room environment” because you want to be able to whistle the CBS college football theme song rather than sing that damn “Happy Birthday to You” melody. In this perilous situation, you can only hope that one of your relatives at the party shares your “illness” and you wind up huddled around the 13-inch television in your in-law’s kitchen. Happy birthday to you.
3) National “Breaking” News Reports
For it is written in the college football fan’s “Ten Commandments of Network Television”…Commandment number one states that breaking news stories should be flashed, in scrolled fashion, across the bottom of your television screen. You believe that if the current–events-thirsty viewers want to learn more, they can switch to one of the other networks that have conveniently interrupted a syndicated Friends episode to show the live footage and interviews from the news-breaking scene. The college football-crazed lunatic doesn’t want to miss the 3rd and goal, early fourth-quarter play that will determine whether Frank Solich is going to attempt a field goal, run the option, or run a 4th-and-goal play action to his reliable tight-end, who is coming clear of an inadvertent pick off the opposing linebacker. Only a college football fan realizes that the Nebraska players aren’t going to wait for Peter Jennings’ repetitive babble and the TV producer’s less-than-creative still photos of the news story centerpiece. You can only take solace in the fact that the rest of the nation shares your anguish. Only the 77,600 ticket holders in Memorial Stadium are immune to this network faux pas. Meanwhile, the game continues while the football fan catatonically sits through the first few seconds of the breaking news update before launching his final chicken wing in a rage that splashes Louisiana Hot Sauce all over his JVC.
4) Severe Weather
Thunderstorms, hail storms, tornadoes, strong winds, ice storms. If any one of these meteorological pitfalls happens to occur over the course of a college football Saturday, it can be the kryptonite of any digital cable or satellite system’s super-capabilities. We all pay homage to the god who created the ABC/ESPN Gameplan, and the college football disciple realizes that $89.99 is mere “chump change” when presented with the opportunity to watch at least twenty different games on a given Saturday. Heaven forbid that one of the football gods might mention to Mother Nature that she’s having a bad hair day, which will surely cause your satellite dish or cable system to succumb to her powers. This tragic weather-induced phenomenon has yet to bring me to my knees. However, the paranoid mind cannot escape the urge to tune into the Weather Channel on a Friday night. Visions of pigskins, rivalry games, fourth-quarter comebacks, and USC cheerleaders dance through my head like sugarplums and lollipops when I know that the local forecast for Saturday calls for clear skies.
5) Your Child’s Soccer Game
Eventually, all of us must grow up (to some extent). We joke about the possibility that our kid’s soccer game (or any youth sport, for that matter) may share the same time slot with a Texas-Oklahoma Red River War. We say that there’s no way we’d miss the focal point of the Texas State Fair to watch a bunch of second-graders run around in a herd-like fashion and kick one another’s shins. Let’s not kid ourselves (no pun intended). We’ll just have to bring our headphones to the soccer game and hope that little Johnny’s/Susie’s mom or dad doesn’t try to bend our ear about the upcoming PTA meeting next Tuesday night. Truth be told, we love our children more than college football, but we go to church to pray that we may never have to decide between the two. For we all know that an error during moral “crunch time” may cause a judge to rule that we see our kids only on the second and fourth weekends of each month for the rest of our lives. A small “sacrifice” is necessary here unless we want our children to end up choosing to live in a tool shed in Montana and write paranoid anti-government manifestos. Although, if I were a betting man, I’d have to guess that Mr. Kaczynski probably didn’t teach little Teddy to appreciate the beauty of college football.
6) Local “Breaking” News Reports
This fear falls along the same lines of Fear #3, but it is far more severe in the sense that you now realize that the entire nation is enjoying the game except for your po-dunk town of Hooterville, Kansas (Brian Billick reference). Local breaking news stories always scare me because, generally, your local affiliate has no regard for the events outside your hometown, obviously including a Miami-Florida State game. The most frightening aspect of local break-ins is the fact that all the news anchors are looking out for number one. Do you think that your local affiliate cares that the FSU field goal unit is lining up the game-tying effort? “Heavens, no!” Coach Bowden would say. This local network invariably has some young gun with stars in his/her eyes who will spare no minor news details in the hopes that an interview with the fireman who rescued a cat from a tree will propel him/her to passage on the money train to network television boarded by the likes of Bernard Shaw (CNN) and Arthur Kent (a.k.a. Scud Stud). Spare us the meaningless details, you college football home wrecker. Just get me back to the game so that I can see Bobby Bowden’s reaction to an inevitable date with a national championship showdown—or another ho-hum top-five finish in the final polls. Dad-gummit.
7) Your Job (The boss asks you to work on an autumn Saturday)
You have only three options. You can either quit, be fired for not showing up, or fabricate a well-constructed fairy tale. Your boss has placed you in a scenario that leaves you no option. It’s October 5, the first significant week of conference play, and you can either tell your boss that you would either love to come into work and help your shareholders garner a yearly $32.45 dividend or tell The Man to “screw off” and plant your happy tush in front of the TV as Ron Zook travels to Eli’s empire, Ralphie welcomes Willie the Wildcat, and Carson Palmer’s Trojans face off against Jason Gesser’s Cougars. Unique from all the other fears, this one leaves you an excuse without the burden of a supposedly foolproof lie or a burdensome alibi. You just have to be prepared. My personal experiences led me down this yellow-brick road a few times while I was a rookie in the corporate mayhem of big business. Any number of excuses will suffice as long as you practice your fabricated tales. Your boss asks, “Would it be possible for you to come into the office and help us sort through the XYZ account mess?” You reply, “I’d love to, but…” (a) “…it’s the first weekend in October, and I need to help my cousin harvest the pumpkins from his pumpkin patch,” or (b) “…daylight savings time ends in 3 weeks, and I need time to practice for the extra “party hour” that I’ll gain on October 26,” or (c) “…I’ll be hung over on Saturday because the BYU/Utah State game is on Friday night, and my buddies and I slam a beer each time a passing play is called.” Okay, so these excuses may have some holes. But you’re a college football fan (you may have even graduated in 6 years), and your livelihood depends on the occasional well-constructed fairy tale.
8) The Holiday Office Party (falling on championship weekend)
It never fails. You love the conference championship games, but unless you have tickets to Atlanta or Houston (or the MAC title game), you stand unguarded from the evils of the holiday office party. What college football fan wouldn’t want to watch a championship game that may very well determine who plays in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl? Hey, don’t complain. At least you get to see the Army/Navy classic, the MAC championship, and the first three quarters of the Hokie-Hurricane and Bruin-Cougar match-ups. Not good enough for you? Me neither. So plan now to devise a foolproof reason why you won’t be able to attend the party. Telling the office party coordinator that you’re scheduled to stand in front of the local supermarket, ringing a bell and dressed in a Santa Claus suit, all while you’re taking donations for the Salvation Army’s Tree of Lights campaign is nothing of which to be ashamed. Whatever it takes. You may burn in the depths of Hades and be confined to watching ESPN Classic footage of the women’s NCAA basketball tourney, but at least you sold your soul for some quality college football. In the end, you’ll feel vindicated knowing that you’re the only employee in your office who didn’t get wasted and hit on your boss’s 17-year-old daughter. (That would be a good thing in case you’re wondering.)
9) You Forgot the Tickets
You are a genius, my friend. Only you, a true master of foresight, would have the wherewithal to store the tickets inside the lucky jacket you always wear to games in late October. However, an unseasonably balmy Saturday, combined with your tight gameday schedule, results in your heading out the front door with your flask, tailgating paraphernalia, and windbreaker—without a trace in sight of that lucky winter coat. You and three buddies embark on a 2-hour road trip back to your college town and are just 10 minutes from your alma mater’s campus when you discover a sinking feeling inside your college football-craving belly. The conversation with your pal sitting in the front passenger’s seat comes to a screeching halt as you realize that it’s less than 1 hour until kickoff and there’s no time to return for the tickets with the hope of seeing any play from the first half. As your mental flatulence dawns on him, one of your buddies lets out a scream that would make Chewbacca’s wail seem suitable for a Sunday church choir. You recover from several neck contusions delivered from the angry backseat fans and can only hope and pray that some reasonable scalper (there’s an oxymoron for you) will have four tickets and a heart the size of Santa Claus. Otherwise, it looks to be an expensive afternoon, as you’ll be picking up the tab at the ol’ campus sports bar, with enough microbrew and appetizers to help soothe the angst of your three newest enemies.
10) Your Internet Server is Down
Any true college football fan has been forced to listen over the Internet to a game that has fallen through the cracks of a television broadcast. The true collegiate pigskin-head can appreciate games from even the “smallest-profile” conferences. As you attempt to log onto the Middle Tennessee State radio feed, you eagerly anticipate the fourth quarter of the MTSU/North Texas match-up that will determine a berth in the New Orleans Bowl. In addition, all serious fans on the mainland want to hear whether Tommy Chang can lead the Rainbow Warriors past Luke McCown’s Bulldogs, even if our PC clocks are ticking slowly into the wee hours of Sunday morning. C’mon, don’t snicker. Games like these make college football great. And if the shortsighted knuckleheads at the television networks can’t come through for us, then surely the Internet age will save our hides. However, all the best computer geeks in the world are unable to free us from the despair that occurs when our PC monitor tells us that our servers are taking lunch (or a midnight snack) at the local Waffle House. As we pound our mouses into submission and curse the name of Bill Gates, we are left defenseless against the powers of modern technology. Even though we settled for the latest Sun Belt scores from the ESPN bottom line broadcasted earlier in the day, we decide against watching highlights of the World’s Strongest Man Competition just to follow those late-night WAC games. We instead go to bed wondering whether all the planets will align and propel our favorite small conference team to the top of the conference standings. As we awake on Sunday and anxiously wait for the ESPN2 ticker to post those late non-televised scores, we are reminded that it’s not easy being a college football fan.
