I know full well that college football is damned near pro football – perched right on the edge, sniffing the rim like a dog in the bathroom. I know that major teams are raking in millions while players scramble to keep from getting a season-ending/scholarship-ending injury. I have no defendable reason to love the game, the pageantry, the smells, the sounds and colors. I didn’t play college ball. I just went to a school that curses alumni with the crimson plague that never ends, a disease known as “Roll Tide.” I suffer greatly from it Saturday after Saturday this time of year.
Orange and yellow leaves can fall through a biting new breeze below a porcelain sky after a torrid summer, and that simple change can make me feel human and warm and good, no matter what evil I have done. Watching 93,000 crimson clad people circling turf and chanting “Rammer Jammer, Yellowhammer, give ‘em hell, Alabama!” can cure shingles, cold sores, lockjaw and athlete’s foot, but it is not a good remedy for high blood pressure.
Watching Game Day and wondering which mascot head Lee Corso will don sets the stage for a season of perfect ulcers. The subsequent fall foliage weaves us together into the false hope of being better people for just a few months. It feels that way when your team is winning. If your team loses, it feels like you stepped on a nail. It hurts for a while.
Perhaps this manufactured, emotional illness is all we need until basketball season begins after the glee and excitement and curses and declarations of wronged heroism and ignored success in the face of blatant commercialism during a 60-minute football game stretched over 4 hours of advertising.
At the end of the fourth quarter, 2nd and 2 on the 3 yard line, in the red zone, going in for the winning score on a play that hasn’t worked four times already, we faintly hear the sweet chaaching of dollars falling through our pockets into the coffers of the gods that rule the fall in helmets and pads and shoes with cleats as they beat each other into lifelong injuries inside a constructed bowl of fanaticism. Damn, I love it.
