College Game Day!!

Yep, s’true:

How galling it must be to Michigan and Notre Dame.

Here they are, the two programs atop the all-time wins list, and they've been banished to relative obscurity while their two most bitter rivals, Ohio State and USC, soak up attention and adulation for their Coliseum showdown.

Charlie Weis' bulletin board offering for the Irish's quest for redemption after being pounded by a combined score of 85-21 by Michigan in the past two years can't even move the meter for this one. After all, Notre Dame and Michigan combined have one fewer vote in the AP poll than Rice. Score that 1-0 Owls.

This game carries the same national significance Ralph Nader wields in the presidential race. It's jolting to see these two proud programs on college football's version of the Green Party ticket. But I'm still looking forward to it. What can I say? I love the tradition, or maybe I just rubberneck in case there's a train wreck.

I’m looking forward to it, too. Say what you will about ND and Big Blue… they still have the winning-est records in college ball and some of the game's most devoted fans. There aren’t many bandwagoneers in South Bend or Ann Arbor, ya know… but there ARE a whole helluva lot of REAL fans. And like all great teams, both schools have huge national followings, even some on The High Plains of New Mexico!

3:43 (ET) this afternoon, NBC.

So… who to hate in that marquee game today? That’s a tough one! SC should probably be the winner in my personal hate-active dislike-fest, but they’re playing OSU… a team whose fans are simply insufferable when they win and even more insufferable when they lose, too. But that’s OK, Buckeye fans think Michigan fans are retarded, at best. So… OSU gets the nod.

Go Trojans!

Other than these two games… I ain’t got a dog in any of the other fights. But I will watch!!

―:☺:―

A couple of re-runs that are more than appropriate for College Game Day…

The Rules

I missed this today before I posted, but it would have fit right in with the lead two items in this morning’s post: “Time for the new rules for college football fandom.” Samples:

1. As a fan, you have to pick a school, one school, same as if you were filling out applications to, you know, go to school there. You may not be a fan of a conference, teams from a specific state, "West Coast football" or college football in general. Nobody is a fan of college football in general, not even Lee Corso. Nor may you root for Harvard and Yale, any more than you could matriculate at both places, unless you're really, really smart, in which case you're probably building prototype military surveillance nanobots in your MIT dorm room, and/or devising a computerized ranking system* to shame Jeff Sagarin.

1a. Under extenuating circumstances, however, you may have up to three Division I-A rooting allegiances, so long as the schools meet the following criteria:

(a) Your birthplace/family school – especially if an inheritance is at stake, or if a campus library bears your last name.
(b) Al(most)ma mater – the school you transferred from.
(c) The school that actually handed you a diploma. Or would have, if you hadn't finished three credits short.
(d) Your spouse's school, especially if the program is vastly superior to your own, or your spouse cares waaaay more than you do, in which case: good call on getting married!
(e) You're a bandwagon-jumping, low-self-esteem weenie and scurry from Notre Dame to Miami to Ohio State to USC to Boise State depending on the year, the polls and the amount of water flooding into the ship.

If you can't be true to a school, at least be true to your own weaselly nature.

[…]

4. If you attended a lower-division or NAIA school, you're allowed to pick a D-I school of your choice. But you must consistently root for that school year in and year out, and it's preferred that the school be geographically close to you.

4a. Or you can just root for Appalachian State every week.

4b. Notre Dame? How very original.

[…]

9. You are allowed to root freely against the following schools for no specific reasons: Notre Dame; Notre Dame in their puke-green jerseys; Notre Dame when playing on "Triumph of the Will"-shaming propaganda house organ NBC; USC; any school that plays its fight song approximately 4,387 times per game like USC; Michigan; Miami; Ohio State; any school like Ohio State with a pretentious "the" in front of its name, because otherwise how would we know which Ohio State university they were talking about?; any school coached by Steve Spurrier; any school coached by Nick Saban. (ed: I’d add “any team from Florida” to this list, but that’s a minor quibble.)

You may have noticed that I’m in the 4b fan category. Given that I never went to college, I’m free to root for the school of my choice, under rules Four and 1a (d) above, even if that means I root for my former spouse’s school (The Second Mrs. Pennington is a Notre Dame alumna). And I have been an ND fan for nearly 30 years now and don’t foresee any change in that status on the near or far horizons. It’s way too late to change allegiances at this point in life. While we’re at it, I should mention I’m a fan of, and root for, at least three schools, depending on who’s playing whom: ND, Michigan (the ten year living-in-Detroit connection), and Air Force. For reasons that should be obvious now. The only time I’m torn is when ND plays Air Force…and I well and truly don’t know what to do during that game. Very traumatic, that.

So, to the author of “The Rules,” especially Rule 4b: Put a sock in it. I like ‘em, otherwise.

And...

A Timely Update

In anticipation of tomorrow’s football games football orgy, I give you the Readers Updates to The Rules. There are some pretty good ones…and I’ll only give you the ones that made me laugh out loud (here, in this post)…

62. You are allowed to root for another school while your team is on probation. (STU_UNGAR1975)
62a. Except in the SEC. This would be way too confusing.
69. All fans are allowed to root for one service academy, but you must pick one. (terpman19)
69a. If you pick Air Force, you must call them the Zoomies.
(ed: Ummm…I’ll respectfully submit a corollary: “Unless you are IN the Air Force, or SERVED in the Air Force, or RETIRED from the Air Force. You will then call the team ‘Air Force.’”)
91. Unless you win the BCS title game, you are not the national champions. I don't care what the AP poll says. (egomaniac)
95. Any conference called "The Big Ten" that in fact has 11 teams must man up and kick one out. (htighe811)
95a. Any Big Ten team who loses to a Division I-AA team is the candidate to be kicked out.
100. Unless you matriculated and graduated from Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT or an Ivy League school, you may not use your alma mater's scholastic excellence as a valid excuse for crappy football. (That means you, Michigan, Notre Dame and Cal.) (winstoncounty)

By the way, the names in parentheses are the people that submitted the rule.

Oh. Almost forgot: GO Irish!!

Be nice and play by the rules all y’all! And I hope your team wins. Unless your team happens to be Michigan or Ohio State, that is.