TOM PETTY’S GREATEST HITS, IN FOOTBALL FORM

American rock legend Tom Petty died yesterday at the age of 66. Now, I’m not normally one for effusive celebrity death tributes, but it’s different when we’re talking about Tom Petty. I know I’m not alone in having found teenaged solace in the defiantly proud music he made, with and without the Heartbreakers, over the course of a decades-long career. The music was universal. Every song he recorded could’ve been made in 1978 or in 2015, and every one of them could be sung along to without feeling like the radio was judging your shitty voice.

Though Petty’s records themselves stand alone, he assembled arguably the greatest Greatest Hits album of all time - condensing a long catalog of albums into the perfect 18-song soundtrack for driving with the windows down or drinking on a porch on a sunny day. Hell, he released a Greatest Hits album, added a new song, and it became one of his biggest hits.

In honor of this, and in a very, very tenuous attempt to tie this back to whatever it is we do here, I’d like to illustrate the universality of those hits by dedicating each one to a college football thing. Is this a cheap, lazy way to create a post? Probably. But I’m also saying something positive about someone from Gainesville on a college football blog, SO EMBRACE THE MOMENT.

[hits play] [cracks beer]

1. American Girl

2. Breakdown

3. Listen To Her Heart

4. I Need To Know

If you think you’re gonna leave then you’d better say so

5. Refugee

6. Don’t Do Me Like That

7. Even The Losers

8. Here Comes My Girl

9. The Waiting

10. You Got Lucky

11. Don’t Come Around Here No More

12. I Won’t Back Down

13. Runnin’ Down A Dream

14. Free Fallin’

15. Learning To Fly

16. Into The Great Wide Open

I’d be lying if I said this particular one wasn’t the whole reason I did this.

17. Mary Jane’s Last Dance

Well I don’t know, but I’ve been told / you never slow down, you never grow old

18. Something In The Air