University of Florida - BCS Champs

It's GREAT!

To be!

A FLORIDA GATOR!

(Even if the system is completely unbalanced and corrupt and should be completely overhauled)

Superfans say...

There has been an ongoing debate in the college football blogosphere about the proper weight to be given to each side in the 2008 Big 12's great offenses/mediocre defenses ratio. Through three quarters, The Ole Miss-Texas Tech Cotton Bowl is helping to clarify that debate.

Looking for signs in the Polish SASS-SAGE... UF 92... OU Negative 3. Unless OU hires DIT-KA, in which case UF 86, OU 11.

An Analogy

Having Tim Tebow on your team is like being the only country with nuclear weapons. You're glad it's you, but it's still kinda creepy.

Your SEC Champion Florida Gators

Your SEC Champion Florida Gators

The creepily impressive football machine has led the Gators to an SEC championship! Bring on the Okies! The preceding assumes the computers cooperate, of course.

Jacksonville versus Houston on MNF

Jacksonville versus Houston on MNF

Tune in now! The Jaguars are putting on a clinic for the entire country on the fine art of sucking at football.

FSU Safety accepts Rhodes scholarship.

FSU Safety accepts Rhodes scholarship.

You won't see me sending many kudos out to the Maroon rejects out in Tallahassee, but when somebody juggles being a Division 1A (Sorry, Football Bowl Subdivision) football player with pulling off a Rhodes scholarship, that deserves notice. I won't feel too bad when he goes to Med School at UF.

Back to Basics

This post should start a new and (very?) occasional series of posts that come to me when I realize a forum response I think I'd want to write is careening off the rails, both in regards to length and content; here we go.

There are apparently four new American Football ("Gridiron") leagues planning to start up in the next year, and I have to admit I'd only heard of the first two on the list:

• -The UFL, planning to play in the Fall on Friday nights, and backed by, among others, Dallas Mavericks and would-be Chicago Cubs owner Mark Cuban.
• -The AAFL, which plans to play in spring in or near college towns, have territorial rights for teams to grab players from nearby schools, and require those players to have college degrees.
• -The New USFL, which somehow claims to be a direct descendant of the 1980s experiment that brought us Herschel Walker, Steve Young, and three-dollar antitrust judgments. The new league seems to care about as much for the traditions of the game as WWE's XFL did.
  
• -The UNGL, which had its Wikipedia page deleted and has logos, but no team locations or names. This one is just confusing and looks more like some graphic designer's fantasy league than a legitimate organization.

I think one of these leagues (I'll nominate UFL as it's the only one I think might play more than one season's worth of games) should take a few small steps back towards gridiron's heritage (including its distant shared ancestry with soccer) and get away from the overly coach-centric mentality the NFL has developed. Obviously, no one wants to return to the bad old days of inadequate protective gear and no substitutes, but there's a chance here for legitimate product differentiation that I for one would appreciate, especially since none of these leagues will be attracting top talent, especially if they all somehow managed to be active at the same time. Namely, I would recommend the following:

1. No TV timeouts. If there's no on-field reason to stop, then for god's sake don't stop. Gridiron already gives you plenty of chances to go to commercial. The timeouts that occur immediately after the kickoff after a score (i.e. ONE play after you got back from the last commercial break) are particularly galling and slow the game down.
2. No telecommunications gear in the helmets. When you do that, you might as well give the coaches a couple of Joysticks and mount electric motors to the players asses. If you can't get your play in with hand signals or a messenger guard, then let the QB call the damn thing.
3. Only players can call timeouts. The game is supposed to be 11v11. At least keep it that way on the field.
4. Strangely enough, I am a fan of instant replay in Gridiron, as the stop-start nature of the game allows it to be used with minimal disruption, but have the reviews done by the officials, as in college, and not via coaches' challenges. If I want to see a contest between two grumpy, middle-aged assholes, I'll watch chess. This is supposed to be a sport. This would also allow institutionalization of the unwritten rule that only significant plays should challenged (e.g. scoring plays, 1st down conversions, and turnovers).

I'm sure I'll think of more as the NFL and College seasons unfold, but there's a start. I'm open to suggestions.

Fairweather fan?

So, my post yesterday has generated a pretty animated response in my estimated readership of one. My wife has told me in no uncertain terms that she is disappointed in the defeatism of the post, and especially the bit about looking forward to the gridiron season. She even went so far as to imply the "FF phrase."

I must insist that a downcast blog post written in the lingering hangover of a weekend of two big losses (one big because of the occasion, the other because of the score line) does not a fairweather fan reveal. I followed the Jaguars when they were 4-12, and when the roster was gutted due to the salary cap sins of the father being visited upon the metaphorical son. When I became a fan of the Atlanta Braves in the 80s, they were mired in years of playing some of the worst baseball the National League has ever seen. In my brief tenure as a soccer fan, I have withstood two straight fizzled promoion campaigns and two straight first-round exits from the MLS playoffs. For god's sake, I even endured the Zook years!

So, for the record, I can't see ever giving up on my Hoops, my Bluebirds, or any other team I follow, and certainly never for a reason as silly as losing games. If I get smacked around by the football gods on some weekends, I might let off a little psychological steam, but these teams are stuck with my grumpy ass for the long haul.

Portsmouth 1 - 0 Cardiff; FC Dallas 1 - 5 LA Galaxy

Not a good soccer weekend for me. At least Cardiff kept it respectable and had some chances, but the magnitude of the loss is still quite the bummer. The Hoops, on the other hand, have me doubting the legitimacy of MLS as a competitive entity. Seriously... 5-1? I can't be the only FC Dallas fan who found himself wondering if the fix was in. The silver lining, if there is one, is to here the (remaining) crowd booing every touch of the World's Biggest Soccer Star™ after he displayed some not-so-classy behavior in the wake of a tough tackle (but one that deserved a yellow at most, if you ask me).

So, when does (American) football season start?

Anyway:

My Clubs, Part Two: Throwball/Gridiron/Helmetball/American Football

First, let me just say that as an American who didn't grow up in a soccer-loving household, and DID grow up in the South, American football was almost pre-determined to be my first sporting love, and it was.

I was never really one for organized activities as a kid, much preferring to go play games with my friends in the street or the yard, but when I was younger my parents did insist that I do one organized sport per year. at 5 and 6, I played soccer (the last soccer uniform I ever wore was the shiny silver and black and collared shirt of the Collierville Animal Clinic... totally blowing away the green tshirt I wore the year before for the Hawks, by the way). At 7 and 8, I actually did Track and Field, the highly individual nature of the sport severely stretching the limits of what my parents were trying to do by telling me to play on a team, but I'm pretty sure my blue ribbon for the 100 meter dash and my red for the baseball throw are still in their attic. 9 through 11 were "full-kit" gridiron, and while I never did quite feel at home with Football players (and coaches), I was hooked on the game itself. I was from Florida, but living in Tennessee, and so I settled on a couple of Miami teams: the NFL Dolphins and the NCAA's University of Miami Hurricanes. Eventually, though, we moved back to Jacksonville and I grew into the "right" clubs for me, as I matured (or didn't, as the case may be).

Jacksonville Jaguars: I am now a proud Texan, and will raise up little Texan babies who will probably root for the Cowboys like their mom, and that's okay, I understand the intertwining of sports and community. But as for me, I am from Jacksonville, a city that has no particularly good reason to have one of 32 NFL teams, but somehow does, and I will not give them up. Like Tim Parks in the Italy essay in the very good book The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, the one thing I hold onto having moved away from the place I grew up is the sports team, because sports provides a disproportionate return on investment in terms of staying connected to one's place of origin. I prefer living in Texas, I will always live in Texas, and I rarely if ever call myself a Floridian when I can call myself a Texan, but it's okay, Jacksonville, because I still love our Jags. I still remember the day when I heard that our little town had landed a BIG TIME team. I was full of pride of place that has never quite left me. If the small-market Jaguars were ever to become someplace else's Jaguars, I doubt I'd ever watch another NFL game.

University of Florida Gators: My alma mater. Of course, don't ask me to SING the alma mater of my alma mater, because I don't know it. I've only been to one game in person, and I left at halftime because it was a blowout and no one would let me sit the hell down (hmm... perhaps I won't be joining the FC Dallas supporters' section anytime soon). Frankly, during college, I mainly associated the football team with missing classes, getting arrested, and keeping me from being able to drive ANYWHERE on homegame weekends because 60,000 alumni and fans flooded into Gainesville and clogged everything up. I often rooted AGAINST Florida when they were favorites, because I have always had a soft spot for underdogs. Hell, one time I specifically took all the french fries from the buffet at the dining hall by my dorm because I knew that was Steve Spurrier in line behind me and might have wanted some.

However, there were two cases where I always, always ALWAYS rooted for the Gators: Postseason bowl games against Yankees and the FSU game. To this day, I still chuckle when I imagine the cute little Big 10 and Big East schools thinking they know how to play College Football; actual results show this to be an unfounded prejudice, but college football fandom is not rooted in sanity, much less proper analysis. It is as severe a tribalism as exists in American sport.

This tribalism is exactly why I now root for the Gators EVERY game they play. It was a small incident, but it tapped into half-conscious, primeval social patterns that I was powerless to resist. I attended graduate school at a school whose sports teams are rivals of the Gators, and once, upon being asked by the person at the bookstore checkout counter where I did my undergraduate work, I answered, and the reply came, dripping with disgust, "Then why are you HERE?" I was taken aback, but quickly realized that when it came to this subject, there was only one tribe I would truly and completely belong to, and I embraced my destiny.

Texas Christian University Horned Frogs: Of course, one of the few ways one might join a new tribe is to marry into it. That is how I came to call the TCU Horned Frogs one of my teams. It is true I will never be as much a Horned Frog as I am a Gator, but at least they're both reptiles, and has a name ever so successfully combined whimsy and menace as "Horned Frog?" My wife is a (very) proud TCU alum, we got married on TCU's campus, and TCU is a spunky underdog that doesn't care what people think about its colors or mascot. As one of the schools thrown out with the bathwater when the old Southwest Conference collapsed in on itself, Frog fans take delight in the successes of the team, especially against the bigger schools that abandoned it. Those successes don't always come, but when they do they are sweet.