October 23, 2002

Football in the Rain

I'm a college football fan. I couldn't care less about the NFL, but I really like college football. It's fun, and it's easy to think that all the coaches are overpaid morons and any randomly chosen true fan could do a better job than most of them. In particular, I'm an Arkansas fan. I grew up in Arkansas, and my family is sports-mad, so I didn't have much choice in the matter, but brainwashed or not, I'm into it now.

I should clarify that it's not easy to be an Arkansas fan. It's a team that always sort of hangs tough in the conference and beats some good teams, but they tend to lose to some mediocre teams, or lose games that they could have won. Arkansas is no Miami or Michigan, perenially good and/or lucky. Until they won the Cotton Bowl in 2000, they hadn't won a bowl game since 1984, and it's not as if they didn't go to any bowls in the years in between, they just lost them all. Naturally they haven't done particularly well in either of the bowls they went to since 2000.

Anyway, I went to an Arkansas home game last Saturday in Fayetteville. It was cold and raining. Just before halftime, it started raining pretty hard, so I pulled on this too-large pancho that wouldn't stay buttoned and sat in the rain watching the band and the flag line try to twirl wet flags (it's not easy, trust me). At the start of the 3rd quarter, I watched my team decide they'd rather be back in the locker room where it was warm than out on that cold field, because they just sort of gave up. It was sad to watch, and I wasn't so thrilled about being in the cold myself.

But I'm still an Arkansas fan, and I reckon I will be tomorrow, too. It's not easy to be an Arkansas fan, but who wants to root for the team who always wins? I can take losing, but I'll tell you, I wish the referees weren't so irritatingly bad. I know they can't discriminate anymore, but really, it's ok to discriminate against blind fellows who want to be football officials. PFFT!

Published: October 23, 2002
Editor: stacy