Go, Roll to Victory, Hit Your Stride

First, let me apologize to anyone who care nothing about sports. There's nothing for you in this post. Sorry. Ok, moving on...

College football starts tonight and while I'm sure my patriotism will be questioned for saying it, I have to admit that I'm a million times more interested in this than I was in the Olympics.¹ Fortunately, I'm also not nearly as invested in this as I was when I was younger. Yes, I still love the games and follow as much as I can, but time and distance have allowed me to realize just how much insanity there is that goes along with what is really just a game.

For a first week, there is plenty going on:

The University of Alabama (the team I grew up rooting for and actually still root for despite never having attended a class there) takes on Clemson on a neutral field. I love that two teams ranked in the top-25 went out of their way to schedule a ranked non-conference opponent to start the season off right. This does not, however, make up for scheduling Tulane, Western Kentucky and Arkansas State as your other non-conference opponents.

Michigan fans (and you know who you are) will get to watch the debut of new coach Rich Rodriguez against Utah and hope to see Appalachian State (you remember them) can spoil the season of another highly ranked team² (this time, it's defending champ LSU and the guy I thought for sure would come home to Michigan and be their head coach). I don't know if Rodriguez will mean more wins, but the offense will be much more fun to watch.

In one of the other games involving two ranked teams, my alma mater, Illinois³, will try to prove that last year was not a fluke by taking on Missouri. Unfortunately, I'm pretty convinced that last year was a fluke and that the only chance that UI has in this game is that Mizzou may be distracted by the people claiming that they have a shot at the national title and may be overconfident (don't see it happening though). At least the Illini have the quarterback with the better name. Really, Chase Daniel is cool, but how can you compete with Juice Williams?

Then of course, there are all sorts of other games that most people don't care about. But if you happen to be at Miami (OH), there would be an opportunity to see your team take on the university which completely did away with its athletic department a few years ago, moving all intercollegiate athletics to the Department of Student Life, putting them approximately on the level with student government⁴.

There are 120 teams, all with a (theoretical) shot at the national title, and it all starts tonight. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go figure out how to see the Alabama-Clemson game which is not showing on my cable provider.

(Other interesting opening weekend games I didn't mention: Kentucky/Louisville, USC/Virginia, Oregon/Washington, Tennessee/UCLA)

¹ Yes, Michael Phelps was impressive, but I wouldn't watch swimming, track or trampoline any other time, so why would I watch it every four years. Also, you can try as hard as you want, but you're not going to get me to think that winning or losing athletic events against other countries makes my country any better or worse than theirs.

² While it is exciting to point out that this is the match-up of two defending national champions (App State won the Division I-AA championship), I don't think ASU is going to get to sneak up on anybody this year. The fear of ending up like last year's Michigan team, which will be remembered for that first game despite ending up with a pretty good season.

³ Actually that's alma mater II. Alma mater I has the weekend off. One could also argue that they have every weekend off, but that's not true despite the scores seeming to reflect that.

⁴ For those of you not wanting to waste time looking it up, I'm talking about Vanderbilt, one of the schools home to the "That's all right. That's OK. You'll be pumping our gas someday." cheer. By the way, that cheer is second only to the declaration by members of the SMU student body that "our maids went to Texas."