I didn’t realize until I started listening to ESPN’s college football podcast recently just how attached to their college football theme song I’ve become. I guess it was just such a minor part of the broadcast I never really noticed it, but hearing it here, divorced from the actual football game, it was surprisingly evocative. Suddenly I was 16 or 17 again, sitting in my dad’s living room, maybe a bowl of guacamole in front of me, ready for another day of football, except that I was actually hurtling across Paris a mile underground.
While I’ve always been a bit bored by the NFL, the appeal to me is clear. There is nothing else in sports, except, perhaps, the first two days of March Madness and Saturdays in the Premier League, like a day of football – jumping from game to game as teams drive back and forth, momentum shifts, storylines emerge, and the struggle builds to an epic climax, before the next round of games begin – it was (and is) a wonderful way to waste a Saturday.
There are a lot of reasons to love college football. The crowds are passionate and massive, and exert a profound influence on the game (especially compared to anemic NFL crowds). Momentum is perhaps the most important factor in the game: A team can seem completely unstoppable until some momentum swing – a turnover, a huge pass, a big third-down conversion – turns the game around and suddenly the previously dominant team is completely out of sorts. The players play passionately, which results in spectacular success and equally spectacular failures.
I actually think the lower skill level benefits the game. Drives in the NFL can seem mechanical, a collection of three-yard runs and seven-yard passes. A fifteen- or twenty-yard gain is a big play. In college football, weak tackling, greater mismatches and fairly often breakdowns in the defense can result in an 80-yard play at almost any time. Even two evenly matched teams will often have many mismatches at individual positions, and watching a good offensive or defensive coordinator ruthlessly exploit these advantages is enthralling on an X’s and O’s as well as visceral level.
College football is saddled with the worst postseason in sports, but even the travesty that is the BCS cannot destroy the purity, and pure entertainment, of the game. This year, as BYU has a legitimate shot to go to the national championship game and BSU and Utah will both deserve BCS bowls, even if they don’t get them, will continue the erosion of the system’s legitimacy.
But in the meantime, I’m more than happy to sit back on a Saturday, surf the games, and cherish the most fun sport out there. And when I hear that music, I will always be an excited teenager in front of the TV in the living room, even if I’m actually in front of my laptop 6000 miles away.
