View From Tunnel 12: The Beginning

After months of waiting for Labor Day weekend to signal the start of football, my favorite time of year is finally here. Baseball can only occupy the mind for so long. Too much talk of instead replay on the base paths just annoys me, not to mention color analysts who talk up the technicalities of baseball far more than its worth.

Now boys and girls. its time for football and it doesn’t matter what kind of pigskin is being tossed around. High school ball is now as big as the college level game and the NFL is the NFL, though I don’t view that side of the street anymore.

Since the Rams, the team of my childhood and early adult life, were taken away by that [expletive] to the right, I divorced them and the league that Pete Rozelle built. Oh well, there is NCAA football which in my opinion is much, much, better then the professional brand. It’s a game where every year we bring out a deep hatred for someone from the famous “other school” across town or in the next county, over the state line, or even way north or south of our beloved school.

Yes, it’s time to see it all happen from my perch at Section 12, Row 59 at the Coliseum. The time has come to read the last of every magazine or blog’s Top 25 picks and start our day with Lee Corso and the gang at College Game Day.

Its time to see if the first of the must-see games that happens late in September, or mid October, or just before Thanksgiving, will actually mean something to the guide we point our remotes to during every week during the season.

The worse that can happen is an Appalachian State-Michigan type of game that shocked us so much that the aftershocks are still resonating. It almost made me forget the Nebraska-Arizona State disaster of 1996. But like everything in life or when we step out of the confessional of any Catholic church, the annual ‘new beginning’ is once again here as we don our game jerseys with a cleansed soul.

Then the season will make its way toward Championship Week and the Bowl games, then finally to the many All-America games(which bore me silly). The only saving grace is that there isn’t a nationally televised skills contest in those games or the Pro Bowl, that would compare the Home Run Derby where we have to hear Chris Berman act as giddy as a school girl when someone hits a towering shot.

For once I’d like the NFL to pit a wide receiver against a strong safety on a pass over the middle and see who survives the collision. Wouldn’t be something to hear Berman shout, “Troy Polamalu hit Braylon Edwards so hard, that he took away some of his bad habits!”

But it would never happen. Union rules I suppose would put an end to that one.

So up to my perch I go all decked out in Cardinal and Gold and my SC cap on top of my salt and pepper hair waiting to see if the usual crowd sitting around me renewed their season seats. Hopefully they did, because this is football season and this is what we live for.

For up-to-the-minute buzz, follow us on Twitter and join our Facebook Fan Page.