College Football

(Editor's note: while the author is on vacation, he is stealing old entries from his archives. Here's one from almost a year ago. Please don't ask for your money back.)

I love autumn Saturdays because one can choose from a veritable potpourri of college football games on tv. To many, college football is "three yards and a cloud of dust." It's the single-wing, the I formation, the lonely end. It's cheerleaders, it's Peyton Manning in sunglasses telling the Vols to go for two, it's Woody Hayes and Bear Bryant and Amos Alonzo Stagg. But more than anything, college football is a coach being escorted onto or off the field by a phalanx of beefy state troopers. And the coach will always have his sideline pass prominently displayed near his pelvis, as if anyone in the state would fail to recognize him and try to block his entrance to the playing field. In a lot of states, the University coach is better known, better loved and certainly better paid than the University president. Florida State's Bobby Bowden is a prime example:



At Florida State games, the ultimate honor is to be the student who dresses like a Seminole Indian (Chief Osceola) and rides to the fifty-yard line on a horse named Renegade, where he (the Chief) plants the business end of a flaming spear into the loamy Florida turf. Ah, the pageantry!