As someone who was raised in the crossfire hurricane known as the USC Trojans football dynasty of the aughts, the allure of college football has always come naturally to yours truly.
While I grew up in the shadows of Annapolis’ Navy-Marine Corps. Stadium, my wandering eye always edged outward towards the football happenings of the Left Coast, thanks to having a father that did his undergraduate years at Arizona before finishing his graduate degree at Southern Cal.
The net result was a strange split loyalty between Pete Carroll’s mighty Trojan monolith on the gridiron and Lute Olson’s well-oiled hardwood machine, allowing me to befuddle all of my friends who chose to worship at the altar of Gary Williams and the NFL.
Each January, I remember ringing in the new year in our household by flipping on the Rose Bowl just in time to watch the Silver Fox himself as the Trojans prepared to swallow some hapless Big Ten team alive on god’s grass in Pasadena.
I remember watching a fresh-faced Mike Williams pillage the Michigan Wolverines’ hapless secondary, bringing an end to the Lloyd Carr era in Ann Arbor and setting the stage for the Rich Rodriguez shit show.
I remember watching a “Remember Some Guys” list of USC QBs (including the likes of Matt Barkley, Señor Butt Fumble himself and John David Booty, to name a few) do just enough to help the Trojans avoid embarrassing themselves in the Pac-12’s marquis bowl game each year.
It was that series of Jan. 1 matchups, alongside the triumph of watching Reggie Bush rip Oklahoma’s heart from their chest cavities (before Vince Young returned the favor a year later), that transformed my CFB fandom from moderate to full on ‘Sicko Mode,’ inspiring me to pursue this woebegone profession in the first place.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that starting the new year by sitting on your ass and watching a few dozen underpaid amateur athletes swinging it out on a parched playing surface is, in my opinion, the best way to set the stage for the year to come.
As we approach the relentless hellscape of a second Trump administration and countless horrors of our own making (climate change, Elon Musk, a Dodgers World Series, etc.) now is a great time to reflect back on the moments that inspired you to love amateur football in the first place.
While the football men of our past are long gone and slinging Wendy’s cheeseburgers and right-wing disinformation, there’s no shame in holding on to their on-field ghosts, using them as a waymarker of sorts in centering one’s amateur football fandom compass each fall.
Most of all, this time of year gives us another reason to rejoice, whether it be because your alma mater just embarrassed Oregon in god’s country or simply because we all get a measure of schadenfreude out of watching Liberty flameout in the tropics each bowl season.
So, in short, enjoy what’s left of our dwindling amateur football supply, dear readers, for our nation’s nuclear winter of NFL postseason discontent creeps closer by the day, leaving many of us longing for the days of fall, when one could enjoy watching Jamey Chadwell get stuffed into a locker by a school named after a state that doesn’t exist.
