I like sports.  A few, like running, I participate in.  Most I simply watch and enjoy from afar.  Baseball, especially lately, has been very good to me.  College Basketball has soared to places in my psyche previously un-thought of.   Pro Football, though it has fallen down the ranks over the years, still excites me from time to time.  I can appreciate a major golf tournament when Tiger Woods is competing for the lead.  Even the Tour de France is interesting for its three weeks a year.  I cheer for the Americans in tennis and, when my artsy-fartsy, eurythmic friends make me feel guilty about it, in soccer.

But I don't plan my life around any of those sports.  I just watched the video pinned to the top of the board and as I did, it hit me all over again, as it does every year in late July.  You can take all those other sports and chunk 'em.  Give me College Football.  I'm sorry David Stern and Roger Goodell and Bud Selig and whoever runs the PGA and the professional cycling tour.  Your problems are miniscule to me.  Good luck with them and I hope they are resolved and the games go on.  But in the grand scheme of what matters to me today, put them a notch above the Lindsey Lohan story.  Maybe two.

On the other hand, let somebody screw up my College Football and my quality of life will measurably decline.   I am not naive enough to believe College Football is pristine.  I know it's not.  But I also know its basic integrity is preserved enough for me to continue to believe in it and enjoy every second of it I can get my hands on.

I am about to make my reservations for Gainesville for the Tennessee game.  I have my tickets (thanks TRO) and my leave without pay slip has been approved.  Sitting here, thinking about being at the game, spending the weekend in Gainesville, fires me up.  I'm gonna eat at Emiliano's, go by the SAE house, drink beer at the Swamp and downtown, tailgate with the home boys and just soak in all the color and noise I can take.  Nearly two months out and I am having fun just making my plans.  I don't do this for baseball, for hoops or for pro football.   But for College Football?   Shoot.  I'll make plans and read articles and watch videos 'till the day I leave. 

You wanna know what makes me tick outside of my beautiful little girls and wife?  Make all the fun you want because it ain't politics, science or philosphy.  College Football makes me tick.  There ain't nothing like it.