The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year

Yes it’s the most wonderful time of the year… No the Christmas sales haven’t started early… yet. I’m talking about that other most wonderful time of the year: FOOTBALL SEASON!

Ah yes, the green, usually artificial turf, the drunken fans in the parking lot, cute girls in face paint. Strangely that also describes the last KISS concert I attended.

But the best thing about football season is the game of football. There’s college football, high school football, pro football and fantasy football.

I prefer the professional football to the collegiate game. I think it takes more guts to stick it out with a pro team moreso than as a fan of a college team. Who are your big college fans? They mostly gather around your USC’s your Auburn’s Texas’s and here in my own city we’ve got Ohio State.

The thing about all those teams is that they’re all perennial winners. A bad season in college football for your a-list teams 7-5 and crappy no-name bowl game. As opposed to pro football where the Superbowl champions can go 8-8 a year later and miss the playoffs.

Saying you love a team who’s going to win the majority of their games every year takes less courage than to stand by someone like say, Cleveland who always looses!

Now of course my argument has been cut down in recent weeks by two teams who would have normally been listed with the schools named above as winning schools. However meeting this week we have winless Notre Dame and Michigan meeting at the big house on Saturday. This will be one of the highest rated games of the week only because people love a train wreck and one of these teams will end up as a total train wreck.

First Michigan. Some will say that Michigan hasn’t won a game since Bo Schembechler died. Less of a coincidence and more accurately the downfall of big blue most likely stems from loosing a very close winnable game to Ohio State for a chance to go to the National Championship last year. Nearly two months later the Michigan team barely showed up to face USC in the rose bowl and were put down nicely in a 32-18 loss.

During the off-season several Michigan players skipped the NFL draft hoping to finish what they started by winning a bowl game, beating Ohio State and winning national championship.

In their first step toward these goals the #5 team in the nation was out played to a 32-34 lose to Division I-AA opponent Application State. Was it over confidence in their returning starters? Was it not taking a Division I-AA team? Whatever it was Michigan lost their competitive edge. They lost their spirit and for the rest of the season they’re the team knocked out of the top 25 by an opponent in another division.

The other half of this week’s 0-fer-bowl is the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame. Three years ago new coach Charlie Weis came to an embattled South Bend to guide the Irish again toward victory. In his first year the team went 9-2, the next year 10-2 effectively giving the team the same record.

Now the biggest issue I had at this point was that Charlie didn’t improve from is first to second year. Yes his pro-style coaching and unseen bag of tricks lead the team to a new start in 2005 but there was nothing new in 2006.

Also, with the highly publicized, yet unarguably mediocre Brady Quinn and many other starters left college to play on Sundays. So this is in all reality a rebuilding year in South Bend.

Who will win this Saturday? I don’t know. But I do know that since College football did away with ties somebody’s going to have to!