Thoughts About College Football — Georgia-Alabama 2020

My relationship with football has always been tumultuous. As a child I enjoyed playing in pick-up or school matches, although my parent never urged me to play in any organized youth football league such as Pop Warner. Growing up in both Upstate New York and California, baseball was more the sport of choice for kids in their school years, and I was both a pitcher and second-baseman through junior high. My college years were spent sequentially at the University of California at Berkeley and UC Davis, and both schools had a star quarterback who ended up in the pros (Bartkowski and Moroski). However, for a variety of reasons including disinterest, I never attended. In the first place, I was too poor for tickets but this also was the era of Viet Nam, protest marches and tear gas, rock concerts, left-wing politics and other life concerns. The latter were my priorities, not football games.

Nonetheless, this changed when I accepted a faculty position at the University of Georgia, a national football powerhouse. My wife and I arrived in 1981, the year after Georgia’s only National Championship, and we were amazed at the all-encompassing role college football played in town and gown life. My relationship with football has grown to, well, love is not the exact word, enjoy perhaps, or have a keen interest in, and possibly you already understand the type of inescapable Southern relationship I am describing. So although I have only actually attended two UGA games in my life (both were sorority “Daddy-Daughter” days), I do follow the machinations of the Southeastern…