We know a lot of West Coast fans tout the timeshift as the greatest asset of living on the best coast: wake up to football for breakfast, eat dinner after action concludes, and then have time for humanity, dishes, life, dates, the rest of the things you do on days not named Saturday. They are not entirely wrong about this, or their argument that humidity is Earth's greatest curse to humanity. You bastards. You lucky, non-perspiring-like-an-apoplectic-pig-all-the-time-bastards.
In comparison the east coast college football fan wakes up and has a quarter of the day before anything happens. It's coffee time, maybe a quick grocery trip, or if you're very ambitious you might mow the yard or so something else loathsome and resembling work. Gameday's on, and that's mandatory no matter how much fun you might make of Tom Rinaldi's twinkly piano sorrow smorgasbord, but it's not football. It's buildup, just like the EPL game you might tack on to the front of the day's action like the horrendous sporting glutton you are.*
*A lifesaver for parents whose children get up on farm time.
The college football fan on the east coast does get the maniac savor of extravagance, though. Your day starts at noon, and then ends twelve, sometimes thirteen hours later on the other coast. You are so insanely spoiled by the instant mobility of satellite television. We all are: the eyeball bounces effortlessly to some of the strangest, otherwise random selection of places: Blacksburg, then maybe Ann Arbor followed by Clemson, then moving with the sun through Baton Rouge, Manhattan, Iowa City, Austin, and on through the Rockies through Boulder, Provo, Salt Lake, and Tempe before running into the sun setting on Los Angeles, Eugene, and the lights of Wazzu and Washington shining through the permadrizzle of the Northwest.
The night in 2009 when Boise upset Oregon in a drab, featureless game involving a team scoring 19 points (no game involving a team winning with a total of 19 points has ever been compelling, ever,) there was nothing, no surprises, no sudden turns, no third act surprises to really go over on the day's tally sheet. Then WHAM! there he was, Byron Hout with his tongue out, talking to the ancestors as Blount was being hauled bodily out of the stadium by Scott Frost.*
*Scott Frost is still huge enough to do this.
It is one of the longer days in sports, but you cannot ever go to sleep early. The diehards know the night ends when the college football suborbital attention machine has floated well out over the Pacific, watching the wind blow plastic bags around the turf in Hawai'i, and perhaps listening to the lilting accent of the Warriors' outrageously biased home announcers. It takes six days for the machine to come back around the globe, and after a while disappears for seven or eight months at a time. No sleep 'til Honolulu is the rule, or at least not until you've run Lou Holtz off your television and can declare the night yours and yours alone.
Loading comments...