Ben Taylor
College football season is the best time of the year. Unequivocally, unquestionably, unabashedly it is the best time of the year.
You may want to debate this claim. You will be wrong. As was already noted, the claim is unquestionable. However, in case you did want to question it, there are three main factors that contribute to college football’s eminent place in the pantheon of college athletics and effectively prove college football season to be the best time of the year where collegiate athletics are concerned.
First among these is the weather. Football season begins at the end of summer, a time when the oppressive heat and humidity largely begin to dissipate, when leaves begin to change color and when it finally becomes practical again to wear a hoodie with shorts and flip-flops. Add college football to this equation, and your results are almost indescribably beautiful.
There are few moments better than those when you can stand in your front yard, rake in hand, college football on the radio, corralling the leaves that have emigrated to the ground into piles ripe for dispelling with a human cannonball, all while listening to the description of your favorite team’s formation at the line of scrimmage. Breathe in; smell the leaves and bask in the chill of early fall. This is the smell of college football, and it is a beautiful thing.
The second most notable quality of football season that helps to set it apart is the rarity of the games. Each team only plays once a week, and although that means there are fewer games, it also means that one can spend more time soaking in the beauty of these glorious events.
Eat quesadillas daily at Mom’s; quesadilla Monday (the sole redeeming feature of Kittredge’s food selection) will start to lose its value. Drive everywhere you go; you will take for granted the value of driving. Go to hundreds of art galleries; all the art will start to look the same. Football is the same way. The quality of its beauty requires that it be experienced in a more restricted fashion than other sports. Its ineffability mandates its rarity.
The final quality that sets college football apart is the potential power of a single play. Perhaps the same argument could be made for a dunk in basketball or a homerun in baseball or a goal in soccer or hockey, but it’s not quite the same for these reasons:
1. Technically speaking, your team has the chance to score on every single play, offensive or defensive. This is not the case in baseball, where one cannot score while playing defense.
2. You can score from anywhere on the field. This is true in theory for basketball or soccer or hockey as well, but it is far less likely to occur in those sports than in football.
3. The involvement of every player in each play is imperative to the success of the team. In soccer, this is true to a degree, but when you’re attacking, you aren’t expecting, say, your goalie to be integrally involved once you pass a certain point on the field. In hockey one sees the same thing. Finally, there is basketball, which is the most individualized team sport that has ever existed (for an example, please see the Cleveland Cavaliers version of LeBron James), though an argument could be made for baseball to share the crown. Football is like a microcosm of society as a whole; each player must know and perform well their role if the team as a whole is to succeed, and all the players must work together on each play for success to become a reality.
These reasons, and many more equally salient ones, set football apart from the rest of the pack of collegiate athletics. There truly is no greater college sport to watch, and there is most certainly no better time of the year where collegiate athletics are concerned.