It’s a Great Feeling to Have Football Season Back

As if you needed Boseephus, fueled on a methamphetamine binge, screaming “Are you ready for some football?” to excite you anymore than humanly possible for the arrival of football. Well, that is if you’re not a proud member of the UCLA Alumni Association, who every week (or is that weak?) has to put up watching a team that operates as if Helen Keller were the defensive coordinator.

There is something special about the arrival of football. It almost seems poetic, though Walt Whitman probably never would have thought to pen anything on the subject of turf toe, or for that matter, index finger tendonitis from overusing the remote. The green fields, the roar of the crowd, and the familiar shrill sound of the referee’s whistle signaling the beginning and end of the game. (That is, unless you’ve bet on any Pac-12 games lately, in which case the game doesn’t end until up to 2 hours after the clock expires.)

All these images bring to mind a sport predicated on twenty-two masses of humanity hell-bent on schlepping a prolate spheroid one hundred yards down the field in the hopes of outscoring the opposition. When put that way, it almost trivializes things. Of course, so does impaling the television with a blunt object once your team of Gostkowski, Gronkowski, and Janikowski drops a kielbasa on your fantasy football aspirations for the year (ow … ski).

Schadenfreude can best be described as taking pleasure in the pain of others. During the fall months each year, it can be amended to include getting satisfaction when your rival team’s best defensive player has his knee turned into spaghetti al dente. It’s amazing sometimes how the optimism and hopes of a long offseason spent pounding one’s chest about how this will be the proverbial “year” their team wins it all dissolves on opening day, manifested in A.J. Feeley coming onto the field at some point and taking snaps for said team. The prospective star wide receiver becomes the guy who takes up a roster spot after his five-percent bodyfat underwent a three-month inflation period, marked by a copious binge of anything with a rind or a doodle attached to it. A blowout loss on opening weekend? Apparently the offseason moves included rolling over. Kicker with a torn ACL? Meet your new holder. Star players dropping like flies? Well, that retread on the end of the bench just went from Division III quarterback to (Carnegie) Mellon-baller (terrible, I know).

With football’s level of unpredictability reaching new heights, maybe it’s a good thing most people don’t put too much stock in the goings on the first weekend. Remember, a suicide pool is not meant to be taken literally, so put the butter knife down; things will get better. No one expected the Bills to run up 41 points on opening weekend, since it was more points than they probably scored over the last few years combined. (Unfortunately, no records exist to validate this stat, as the folks in Buffalo have been involved in their own pool over by the Niagara Falls since Jim Kelly retired. The fans in the Bills’ adopted homeland, Toronto, have not quite adapted to the NFL’s brand of “hoser” football, where the fields are not measured in meters and the goal posts are suspiciously in the back of the end zone.)

If you’re not living where an NFL team is present — Anchorage, Cheyenne, Los Angeles — you’re probably renouncing your religion over taking Peyton Manning for your fantasy team, which was supposed to be your excuse over not having to do any meaningful work through December. The lure of the $400 payday was all the justification needed to spend every waking hour pouring over the free-agent scrap heap: “How can I go wrong with a guy named Cecil Shorts?”

If the competition and star power don’t pique any interest, perhaps the camaraderie or lack thereof would fuel a fire. Though I’m still not exactly sure what Jim Harbaugh’s deal is, he sure dealt Pete Carroll a humbling loss this past weekend. Coach Carroll may not necessarily be a drinker but he could have used Ginn on the rocks after Ted Ginn’s double shot of runbacks on Sunday. Perhaps, for Pete’s sake, maybe they will change the mascot to, I don’t know, something that doesn’t conjure up images of a wayward bird that eats garbage.

College football continues to appeal to the fashion unconscious. Perhaps you saw Maryland’s tribute to medieval jousting competitions (or at least an homage to NASCAR racing flags). Those uniforms tended to make Oregon’s consignment-inspired designs look like haute couture by comparison. As the first few weeks have elapsed in the new season, major college football programs have continued treating their conferences like a house boat: don’t like your neighbors, then pick up the anchor and move elsewhere. Projections indicate that, at the current rate, the former Pac-10 conference will include thirty teams by 2020, 65 by 2100, and, in 2500, will have some sort of intergalactic playoff system to appease the increasingly disenchanted fan bases. It should be interesting when USC starts recruiting on Saturn’s moons.

Well, once the formalities of crushing defeats of Wofford are out of the way, the rivalry games are sure to further boost curiosity and, like the changing of the seasons, the SEC winning everything, and Boise State getting the consolatory giant shaft from the Coaches Poll, normalcy will reign in the collegiate pigskin ranks.

Rejoice, rejoice! Football has returned. It’s the awe-inspiring beauty of a tight spiral. The deftness of a quick running back. The speed, the synchronicity. Or, like the weekly readers of this column have discovered, the art of knowing when to punt.