Making full and appropriate use of holidays is just one of college football’s many virtues.
The ADD-inducing New Year’s Day marathon requires no elaboration.
Thanksgiving is also brilliant. Just as Turkey Day itself is strictly reserved for a nation that needs to get its fix of laughing at the Detroit Lions, the Friday that follows is a special college football holiday of its own, meant for the bitter Big XII feuds of Texas-Texas A&M and Nebraska-Colorado.
What? You go shopping on that day?
Puhleeze! There’s more than one way to spell a word that is pronounced the same as “maul,” but the meaning is identical in both cases.
Likewise, there is Halloween, which lands almost perfectly at the midpoint between Labor Day and the BCS title game. Many programs, like the lame party guest that doesn’t put much imagination into his disguise, traditionally celebrate by shedding clumsy costumes that poorly reveal their true nature (See also: Michigan State, among others.)
Yet the best tricks and treats are the teams that put on artful disguises that will carry them all the way into the New Year before being removed. Sometimes this is a good treat, and sometimes not (we’re looking at YOU, Buckeyes.)
A pleasant surprise for most of us was the "untested Boise State" look, on full display ten days before Halloween, 2006, when the Broncos were just a failed two point conversion away from a 28-28 fourth quarter tie on the road against Idaho, a weak WAC rival. What a great costume! Bob Stoops was so surprised when they decided to take it off just before playing in the Fiesta Bowl.
And so, as we head toward the sorcery weeks of this college football season, I am already seeing some evidence of things that are not as they appear, or are at least not as they should be.
Michigan State cracking the top-25
This is just idiotic. I’m a huge fan and very optimistic about the direction of the team, but the No. 19 and No. 23 badges hung on them by the USA Today and Associated Press polls this week are so absurdly premature that it disgusts me.
They lost a close one to Cal, the only demonstrably good team that they’ve played thus far. And yet the Bears are ranked below the Spartans in the USA Today poll and not at all by the AP (which put Cal two spots below Tulsa on the list of teams also getting votes.)
comments (0) write a comment »
write a new comment
This article has no comments.