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As I write this, only 10 days remain between this very moment and the day that the 2011 college football season kicks off. I'm slowly reacquainting my brain with the football season version of itself, which is able to find games, and plenty of them, every day between Thursday and Monday from the beginning of September until Christmastime. But here's the thing. There hasn't been that much hype about the upcoming college football season, and my brain requires such hype to efficiently switch gears from its summer mode (during which it decides to wear shorts to work and drink too many gin and tonics). In terms of the NFL, there's been plenty of talk orbiting around who got traded to where and which Raider fan punched which 49ers fan and why the Seahawks trying so hard to blow this season and that sort of stuff.
But when it comes to the college game, however, there isn't the sort of rah-rah media pump-up I'd expect this late in the summer. Rather, all attention is on the scandals that have all but pushed any commentary about the game itself to the sidelines. And, of course, I'm talking mostly about the recent allegations that more than 70 University of Miami players and coaches took cash, booze, dinners, hookers, lodging and other absurdities from a booster named Nevin Shapiro, who just so happens to be serving time in a federal prison because his Ponzi scheme turned out to be a, well, Ponzi scheme.

I was in Virginia last weekend, sitting in a hotel named after a Confederate general and watching, of all things, kids from Bend, Oregon, play baseball. As you should know by now, Bend's all-star Little League team (from the South division) went all the way to the championship of the Northwest regional championship. They were one game away from heading to the Little League World Series.
But they lost 7-1 to a squad of kids from a town in Montana most of these young Bendites had never heard of, putting an end to a summer these young guys won't forget. I'm not trying to say that playing on national television is the best thing that will ever happen to these kids because no one peaks at 12 years old. OK, maybe Mozart and Gary Coleman, but for the most part, there will be great things ahead. Nevertheless, it might have felt like that to some of these players. When I was 12 and played Little League All-Stars, I did, in fact, feel like it was the most important thing in the world. At the time, it probably was.

Last Friday night, I was earnestly paying attention to a guy in a crowded bar who was telling me how crowded this bar happened to be when my eye caught a glimpse of one of the many televisions in this particular drinking establishment, prompting me to tell this new acquaintance to “shut up for a second.” I then pointed to the television where I could see about 50 men, half wearing the orange and black of the San Francisco Giants and the others being members of the Philadelphia Phillies, pushing and shoving each other. Well, some of them were pushing and shoving, others (like the presumably quite stoned Tim Lincecum) were merely milling around the fringes of the pack trying to look involved while actually wanting nothing to do with the whole affair.
The brawl wasn't really much of a brawl and probably wouldn't have even turned into the disappointing showing of fisticuffs it ended up being had it not been for Giants' catcher, Eli Whiteside, inexplicably performing a weak-ass double-leg takedown of Philly Placido Polanco. But, as is protocol, both benches emptied and all hell broke loose for five minutes, after which the umpire dramatically tossed a few players from the game.

Growing up, whenever there was a mention of infamous skyjacker D.B. Cooper, my dad would tell me a story about attending a SuperSonics game a few days after Cooper hopped out of a plane on Thanksgiving eve, 1971. During a lull in the game, the public address announcer said, “We have a late-breaking score. D.B. Cooper: $200,000, Northwest Orient Airlines: 0.”
The crowd laughed and plenty of folks cheered, my dad tells me. And since the first time I heard this story, I've considered D.B. Cooper to be the Northwest's first true underdog.
If you haven't already heard, the FBI has what they're calling a “credible lead” that might finally lead to the true identity “D.B. Cooper,” the man who parachuted out of a passenger jet somewhere outside of Portland and was never seen again. The suspect, a Pacific Northwest resident, has been dead for 10 years, they're saying, meaning that some guy might be about to discover that his grandpa was D.B. Cooper. Now, you'd think this would bring shame on a family and it probably would – that is, if this wasn't the Northwest, where D.B. Cooper is more of a hero than a criminal.
It's not like we in the Northwest applaud the act of hijacking. I'm 95 percent sure that most Northwesterners are categorically opposed to the hijacking of anything, and the other five percent mistakenly figured “hijacking” had something to do with improving the functionality of their bongs. But, as Northwesterners, we look at someone who jumped out of a moving airliner with $200,000 strapped to his body without hurting anyone and say, “Well, you have to hand it to him for pulling that off.”

There was a buzz of relieved excitement in my office on Monday morning when news came across the wire that the NFL and the players union were about to approve a new collective bargaining agreement that would effectively end the great lockout of 2011. In short: there will be NFL football this year.
But I didn't really rejoice. This surprised me. I'm a card-carrying NFL fan (that was a metaphor, there is no actual card required to watch football on Sundays) and have been since the days when I dressed as Steve Largent (the football player, not the slightly racist politician) for Halloween. I then realized that I had given up on the millionaire owners and the millionaire players coming to any sort of sensible plan as to how they could all remain millionaires while also holding a 2011 NFL season for the non-millionaires to enjoy.