Outside

If you're an American human male between the ages of eight and 108, it's quite probable that you have, at the very least, a passing interest in American-style football. If you're a female in the same age bracket, you're also likely to enjoy the occasional pigskin matchup, too. Football addiction doesn't discriminate along gender lines. If you don't watch football, that's fine. Totally understandable. Worthy of applause, in fact. Someone out there has to cure cancer and read Proust, I suppose.
But for much of our football-consumed population, this weekend's college football kickoff is a time of transition from summer to something much, much lazier. We trade our sunscreen for sweatshirts, mojitos for canned beer, family time for bar time, chase lounges for couches, the glow of campfires for the flicker of your rich uncle's 97-inch high-definition plasma screen. We become first-down obsessed versions of our former selves and if you're in a fantasy league, you're probably just barely able to function in any sort of industrious capacity.

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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.