Week four of the college football season was an important one, as many teams began conference play. Gone for the most part were the tune-up games against depleted FCS squads.
Like all good television, the NFL has its fair share of action and drama. But after the past two weeks, pencil this season in to sweep the Daytime Emmy Awards for the most dramatic soap opera on television. Yes, we’ve been treated to phenomenal performances in the first two weeks.
Denial is the first stage of grief. Like many Virginia football fans, I have spent the last few days denying there was a college football game in Atlanta Saturday afternoon.
“Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.” I am not a Latin scholar, and I doubt most of you are either, but we all know that phrase.
Even if your only connection to sports journalism is through Twitter, chances are that you are well aware of that rule.
Nobody got his money’s worth from this highly hyped Penn State showdown. What we got instead is far more valuable: a genuine human drama that reinforced everything we truly love about college football.
Though the vast majority of the 50,081 fans who flocked to Scott Stadium donned orange for Virginia’s first home football game of the season, the color gray most defined the Cavaliers’ 43-19 win against Richmond Saturday.
The Wes Anderson-directed Moonrise Kingdom was my favorite film of the summer. As is characteristic of Anderson’s films, Moonrise Kingdom offered both a charming, quirky brand of humor and a thought-provoking central theme, all the while unapologetically embracing its weirdness. Once upon a time, college football was the Moonrise Kingdom of big-time American sports.
As sports fans we form a bond, sometimes practically spiritual in nature, with a team or player. We build memories of that connection, that team’s achievements or that player’s incredible moments. Then the very next year many of those same players have departed. New faces replace the old, rendering the team fundamentally different from the team we remember.
Dez Bryant’s 2012-13 rules for success: 1. Focus 100 percent on football. 2. No more “allegedly” assaulting mom. 3a. Stop doing stupid things. 3b. Grow up and stop being a distraction.
