College Football Preview, Part 1

Welcome to the Sherman Avenue Block Party college football preview! We’ll be covering most of the major conferences, and you can expect in depth analysis, informed insight, and highly opinionated opinions.

Well, you can expect all that when Kris, aka The Innovator, posts about college football. Not so much from me.

I’m the least likely candidate to kick off the Sherman Avenue Block Party college football previews. My relationship to college football is as a casual fan. Let me briefly explain how I got there:

1) Nature

Like all the writers here, I grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, in the New York City area. Teaneck is not a college football town, and New York is not a college football city. There are no local colleges that play high-level football. Teaneck High School was much more of a basketball school than a football school (no offense if you’re reading this, Mssrs. Elegbe and Wellington) so we did not have a natural allegiance to a college where our town-mates went to play.

2) Nurture

My parents did not go to colleges with big college football traditions. Nor are my parents sports fans. So there was no college team I was raised to root for.

3) Personal Experience

I went to Indiana University. Not a football school in the slightest – Indiana earns its reputation as a basketball state. It also isn’t much fun rooting for a team that routinely got beat handily and embarrassingly by other Big Ten schools; so most IU students simply didn’t pay attention.

4) More Personal Experience.

During my sophomore year at Indiana, I worked for a catering company that provided dinner for the football team in a room under the stadium Monday through Thursday nights. I had to set the room up, then work behind a buffet line serving, then do some dishes. They got this dinner service the whole year, not just during the season.

It was quite the crap job, but it was solid money for only three or four hours a night, close to where I lived (my apartment was only a couple blocks from the stadium), and the lady that ran the room let us take all kinds of free food home, so my grocery bills were minimal.

During my sophomore year, the football team was beyond awful. They were losing by huge margins, and I’m pretty sure they lost the homecoming game to Michigan 38-0. Yet a lot of these guys were beyond assholes, walking around super-fucking-cocky like they were somebody. Not all of them, mind you, but a majority of them. In my mind, shouldn’t they have been apologetic, humbled by their inarguable failure and with their status as embarrassments to the student body? In their minds, no, I guess not.

The coach was fired after the dismal season. The new coach they brought in to bring some degree of glory to the program was a man named Cam Cameron.

Just looking at him, you could tell that Cam Cameron was a smug, arrogant motherfucker. He looked like the kind of guy that doesn’t tip the valet after parking his Jag for him. The kind of guy that wouldn’t look out of place at some WASP-y yacht club wearing topsiders and a blue blazer. The kind of guy that probably drinks vinegar and water he’s such a douche.

One day, as I’m standing on the buffet line serving food, just doing my job, Cameron comes up to one of the linebackers that I’m serving. Here’s the exchange:

COACH CAMERON
You going to be going to class, Jabar?

LINEBACKER
Oh, yeah, coach. You know me.

COACH CAMERON
Because if you don’t, you know, we’ll have you working back there.


He said that like I wasn’t standing right there.

But I was in fact standing right there. And I didn’t take kindly to the insinuation that only dumb non-class-going people would end up working in food service.

I mean, the nerve of this guy, insulting my intelligence to my face? Like I wasn’t obviously a student who wasn’t lucky enough to have the thing I was good at warrant a free admission to college, so I had to work to help pay my bills. Like I wasn’t vastly more likely to succeed at the thing I was at college for than this group of guys who wouldn’t even sniff the CFL once their eligibility was up.

So later on I complained to the lady that ran the room. She was cool, though she was one of those kind of crazy white trash ladies that if I saw her on Springer it wouldn’t have shocked me. She complained loudly, and it ended with Cameron writing us an apology letter.

But fuck an apology letter. And fuck him. I carry grudges.

(And by the way, it pleases me to no end that he is now the coach of my most hated NFL team, the Miami Dolphins. It’s like a two-for-one sale at the Hate Store. After he got booed for drafting Ted Ginn, Jr. I smiled for a week.)


My point is, I am not deeply invested in college football. And without that level of investment, I can’t bring myself to follow it too closely. Plus I find the quality of play inferior to that of the NFL.

Not to say that I ignore college football. I do look at the scores for the top 25. I do watch some games when I’m home on Saturdays. I try to catch the big exciting match-ups, your Texas-Ohio States, your USC-Notre Dames, and so on. SEC football intrigues me because of the insanely passionate fan bases. The atmosphere at college games can be really exhilarating, even watching on TV. The history and long-standing rivalries also are fun to follow – watching season-long storylines develop and unfold, weaving intricate narratives and causing such emotional response from so many people.

So there it is. I pay attention, but not that closely. I’m a causal college football fan. And here is a casual college football fan’s preview of the Big Ten and Pac Ten conferences.


BIG TEN

Michigan and Ohio State will most likely be the best teams in the conference, and be vying for a national championship. That’s how it pretty much always is.

Penn State might be okay, depending on how senile Joe Paterno really is. But they typically field a good team. Though if their running back is good, it’s probably best not to draft him into the NFL, as he will suck (look under Enis, Curtis and Thomas, Blair.)

Wisconsin will probably have a really good offensive line, and win a bunch of games early on, then they will lose a game they shouldn’t have lost, because they almost always seem to do that. All of their games will be unwatchable, as all sports programs at the University of Wisconsin are boring yet effective.

Iowa and Michigan State might be pretty good or might suck horribly, sometimes in the same game.

No one cares about football at Purdue, Illinois, Minnesota, or Northwestern, unless you go/went there, and even then, maybe.

Fuck Indiana football.

You want a prediction? Hold on, let me get a coin. (flips coin) Michigan wins the Big Ten. Why not?


PAC TEN

I defy any casual college football fan to name all the schools in the Pac Ten without consulting the Internets.

USC is in the Pac Ten. They’ll probably be good again, though one day someone will have to explain to this Jets fan how Pete Carroll can be a genius head coach

UCLA is in the Pac Ten. Sometimes they are okay at football for a basketball school – every once in a while they get a great QB they ride for a while. This year? I don’t know.

Cal is in the Pac Ten. People usually predict Cal will be better than everyone thinks. Then they aren’t.

Then there’s a whole bunch of other Pac Ten teams that can be okay occasionally, like Oregon, or Washington, or Arizona State, or Oregon State. Arizona usually isn’t much of a football school (and you know it, Matt.) Neither is Stanford or Washington State. At most, maybe two of these teams will be worth watching for more than a minute or two.

If there are any other schools in the Pac Ten, I don’t care about them. Are they even on TV ever?

USC most likely wins the conference, unless this is the year Cal decides that exceeding expectations is much more fun than not meeting them.


And there you have it, the casual fan’s preview of the Big Ten and Pac Ten conferences.

We’ll be posting college football previews this week, and NFL previews next week. So look out for it!