Saturday morning, 9:04 a.m., I am on my second cup of coffee and ESPN has not shown me a single football. They have shown me a man in a banana suit, a sorority girl holding a poster of her own face, and a graphic explaining what an offense is. I came here for college football. I am being held hostage by signage.
I started keeping a notebook last year because Denise said I was yelling at the television in a way that worried the dog. So now I tally. By the first commercial break this morning, GameDay had aired eleven minutes and forty seconds of crowd signs, two minutes of a kid proposing on the riser, and a four-minute segment about which mascot would win in a fight. Football, the sport: zero minutes. A clip of last week’s punt: thirty-one seconds, and they cut away before the punt landed.
The sign that broke me said HI MOM SEND MONEY. They held on it for what felt like a week. The host laughed. The analyst laughed. A graphic appeared with the kid’s Venmo. I am not making that up. The kid had a Venmo. His Venmo was on national television at 9:11 in the morning, and somewhere in this country a real defensive coordinator was trying to install a coverage and could not get a producer on the phone.
Coach DiMaggio used to say the only sign he wanted to see at a football game was the scoreboard, and if you couldn’t read it you were sitting too far away or you weren’t paying attention. He coached us in 1979 in a windbreaker that smelled like Vicks and cigar smoke and he would have set fire to a foam finger on principle. I think about him every time a sideline reporter asks a 19-year-old to describe his “why.”
The new analyst desk is four men shouting and one man in a vest. The vest used to be Lee Corso, who at least had the decency to put a mascot head on and stop talking. Now the vest is a gentleman whose entire job appears to be saying “that’s a great point” while another man yells about a parlay. There is a parlay segment. On the pregame show. For college kids. Before lunch.
My buddy Ray Kowalczyk called at the half — meaning the half of GameDay, because actual football has still not happened — and said he had given up and driven over to the high school in Westfield to watch a JV game in the rain. He said the JV coach made his quarterback run laps for showboating after a first down. Ray said it was the most beautiful thing he’d seen all year. Ray cries at car commercials, but I believe him.
My grandson informs me his favorite quarterback at Auburn has an emoji. Not uses one. Has one. It’s a little tiger wearing sunglasses, and you can put it in your texts, and there is a mattress company involved somehow. The kid has thrown four career passes. Two of them were completions. He has a brand consultant and a podcast called The Pocket, which is what he is calling his pocket now, as a concept. I asked what they talk about on the podcast and my grandson said “his journey.” The kid is twenty.
Down at the diner, Petey Corrigan still does Saturday college football the right way, which is a radio on the counter, a paper open to the AP poll, and a running argument with whoever sits down. He doesn’t own a smart television. He doesn’t know what RedZone is. He thinks NIL is a kind of valve. He is, by every measure that matters, the happiest man in this county on a Saturday in September, and I will die on that hill.
The game finally kicked off at noon. It was Iowa and somebody, and it was 6-3 at the half, and it was perfect. Three-yard runs. A punt that traveled a country mile. A kicker missed wide left and his teammates patted his helmet instead of filming him. For three hours nobody mentioned a parlay. For three hours I forgot about the banana suit.
Denise is bringing chili. She says it’s from a podcast. I’m letting it go.