Ode to College Football

Now that I’ve returned to Scotland after five happy years in America, friends have been asking me what I miss about the United States. They never guess the answer: I miss college football.

Why should I be interested in the Democrats in Denver or the Republicans in Minneapolis when there's richer, more wholesome drama on offer in college towns across America? Give me Ann Arbor in the fall; give me Saturdays in Tuscaloosa. Sure, there are many great sporting occasions in America, but none quite compare to the joys of the opening weekend of the college football season—which is why I’ve been waiting for this Saturday all summer long.

It may be as curious for a Scotsman to crave college football as it might be for an American to fall in love with cricket, but curiosities abound and we each contain multitudes. Whatever. Perhaps it was the sight of an entire turkey being deep-fried in a windy cow-field at State College, Pennsylvania, or the genteel politeness of tailgating in Ann Arbor that helped persuade me that it would supplant baseball as my favorite American sport. My particular affinity for the University of Michigan is due to a roommate who bled their maize and blue. A small corner of Scotland will thereby be a loyal part of the Wolverine nation this fall.

Among the most enjoyable parts of college football fandom is exploring a subculture that, for foreigners, remains a hidden sporting gem. College football reigns supremen in the America that tourists never see—few great cities are hotbeds of collegiate football, and foreigners rarely find themselves in Gainesville, Columbus, Athens, South Bend, or Norman. In an age when London papers publish tips for trips to New York, these less familiar places remain uncharted territory and, accordingly, can seem oddly exotic destinations.

Baseball and the NBA have long targeted overseas markets while the NFL has built an international following these past twenty years, even playing a regular season game in London last year. Thus the rest of the world pays attention to the likes of Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady, and the New York Yankees when it watches American sports at all. But college football might as well exist in another country altogether, one that is arguably more truly American than anything the big leagues can offer.

I discovered, quite by accident, that my former home of Washington, D.C. was actually an ideal location for falling in love with college football, precisely because there’s no football power in the city. Each fall I’d become aware of a deep divide between my friends who attended Ivy League universities and those who studied at public universities in the South or across the Midwest. At parties, the former group would be immersed in the usual Washington small talk: the prospects for social security or immigration reform and the usual political and media gossip; the latter, by contrast, were liberated by the return of something much more important—the opening kickoff.