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THINGS YOU WILL NEVER HAVE TO PUT UP WITH

By Spencer Hall
They were last seen sixty miles deep in the Cambodian jungle. Radio communications have ceased.
They were last seen sixty miles deep in the Cambodian jungle. Radio communications have ceased.


As the nation crawls from its Super Bowl hangover crater, let us count the ways in which we are fortunate as college football fans. Like NFL fans, we are without football, and for a good long while. Yet you've dealt with that before. You've picked up new hobbies.* You've met new people in previous offseasons.** You've become better people in the process and emerged from the pupae of the offseason a bolder, more beautiful and confident butterfly.*** It's gonna be excelsior!

You also have this to come back to, dear reader: a chaotic, ungovernable mess of a sport that while molested by numerous meddling television hands never quite gets the full rapine afforded the NFL by Fox Television. You may have to tolerate Craig James and Bob Davie, but you'll never get to listen to Joe Buck's voice announce touchdowns with the desperation of a man with one toe on the trigger of a shotgun he will never fire. Joe Buck and Jim Nantz are the CBS and FOX announcers of record for anything important, and that is the thought that will keep you running into the arms of our collective sports Mubarak (ESPN) every time. They might be despots, but dammit they're not the ones who are going to kill me with long stretches of sonic whitewash.

Also, the NFL's positioning as an unofficial branch of the military is uncomfortable, if only because we imagine their coaches being in charge of things on the battlefield. Chan Gailey thinks Verdun "was a pretty good gameplan" by the French,  and with Andy Reid's timing issues under pressure his appointment as artillery commander means lots of friendly fire casualties. Conversely, if we take college coaches and put them in the same situation, we're signing up for SeaBee duty with Commander Bielema: a 12 pack a day for each man, three hours plowing runways out of the jungle with a bulldozer, and then night duty plowing the locals with booze and the ol' thrilldozer.

(Oh, and you know the coaches who'd actually wanna be out killing people. Carl and Bo have gone behind enemy lines, sir--far, far beyond the terms of engagement defined in their original mission. Their methods have become...unsound. Their mental state...unstable.)

*Drinking

**Counselors, vagrants.

***Like this butterfly, actually. .