We Interrupt This Marriage to Bring You Another College Football Season

          This weekend I will say good-bye to my wife and daughter and head straight for the sofa.  As my wife is fond of saying, “We interrupt this marriage to bring you the college football season!”

            For the next five months, I’ll spend each weekend parked on my sofa, with my remote control channel changer firmly in hand.  Hold my calls, please!  I’ll be busy watching the thrill and pageantry of college football, as outstanding scholarship student athletes from some of the nation’s finest institutions of higher education engage in an extra-curricular activity of knocking each other on their collective highly-educated fannies.  Many of these outstanding scholarship student athletes go on to highly lucrative careers in the National Football League.  Others will go to prison.

            For me college football is not a game.  It is a way of life.  This is true for two reasons.  First, I’m a southern male and therefore, I’m absolutely convinced that I am expert in the field of college football.  As my friend Tim Priest has observed, “Every southern man thinks he can do two things.  First, he thinks he can grill the perfect steak.  And second, he thinks he can coach a football team.”

            Second, I’m a graduate of the University of Tennessee, where I majored in Football Appreciation.  The official school motto is, “In pursuit of honor, truth and bowl games.”

            I’d like to tell you that I spend my autumn weekends watching college football because I love it.  However, nothing could be further from the truth.  The fact of the matter is that watching college football makes me downright miserable.

            Nothing is more traumatic than the experience of watching one’s alma mater snatch defeat from the jaws of victory year after year after year.  For example, each year in mid-September, I go through the shear torture of watching my alma mater, the University of Tennessee, lose to the University of Florida.

            Watching a Tennessee-Florida football game is like watching the Harlem Globetrotters play the Washington Generals.  There’s a lot of clowning around, and for a while everybody has a good time.  But you know that when it’s over, the Globetrotters are going to beat the hapless Generals for the 1,432nd consecutive time.

            Now that I think about it, watching a Tennessee-Florida football game is like watching the old Perry Mason TV show.  The Gators are Perry Mason, Paul Drake and Della Street, and poor Tennessee is Hamilton Burger.

            Frankly, I think the University of Tennessee should hire a really good lawyer and try to settle this year’s Tennessee-Florida game by offering the University of Florida a large cash settlement.

            But despite the fact that college football causes me so much pain and sorrow, I am addicted to it.  Call me the Brokeback Vol, but I just can’t quit college football!

            Now, if you will excuse me, I am headed for the den.  ESPN is about to broadcast the kick-off of the big game between the University of Southwest Northeast Louisiana Fighting Boll Weevils and the Southeast North Carolina State University Fighting Parole Violators.  The winner will be in the driver’s seat for a trip to the Sugar Bowl, unless of course the team either goes on probation or to jail or both.

            And before I go, here’s a message to my wife and daughter, I love you and will miss you.  See you in January!