Tradition!

Cue up Tevye (Tradition!)... coz today marks the beginning of a long-held tradition here at El Casa Móvil De Pennington... that being the all-day college football orgy. 

On any given every Saturday from now through the end of November you can expect to find my tired old ass parked in front of the teevee... beginning around 1000 hrs and lasting well into the night... and don't expect to find it anywhere else.  I do not accept social invitations on Saturdays in the Fall... unless that invitation is specifically and explicitly to watch a game, and that game MUST be one I would normally watch.  Don't be calling me up to come over and watch Middle Tennessee State play Clemson... coz that just ain't gonna happen.


Speaking of ringing me up... it's not a good idea to even call me on Saturdays between now and the end of November... unless you want to talk about a game we're both watching in the here and now... coz I'll be busy and you will just be an interruption.  There are a few possible exceptions to the foregoing and nearly all of them involve events of a catastrophic nature, such as desperately needing bail money, transportation to the hospital emergency room, a critical need for beer (no, wait... gitcheer own damned beer!) or some other bona fide emergency. Use your judgment here.

I'm going to post a couple of re-runs in the space below... Tradition! ... but before I do there's this other piece of business we have to get out of the way:

And now... the re-runs.  All references are dated, of course.  These are re-runs.

The Rules

I missed this today before I posted, but it would have fit right in with the lead two items in this morning’s post: “Time for the new rules for college football fandom.” Samples:

1. As a fan, you have to pick a school, one school, same as if you were filling out applications to, you know, go to school there. You may not be a fan of a conference, teams from a specific state, "West Coast football" or college football in general. Nobody is a fan of college football in general, not even Lee Corso. Nor may you root for Harvard and Yale, any more than you could matriculate at both places, unless you're really, really smart, in which case you're probably building prototype military surveillance nanobots in your MIT dorm room, and/or devising a computerized ranking system* to shame Jeff Sagarin.

1a. Under extenuating circumstances, however, you may have up to three Division I-A rooting allegiances, so long as the schools meet the following criteria:

(a) Your birthplace/family school – especially if an inheritance is at stake, or if a campus library bears your last name.
(b) Al(most)ma mater – the school you transferred from.
(c) The school that actually handed you a diploma. Or would have, if you hadn't finished three credits short.
(d) Your spouse's school, especially if the program is vastly superior to your own, or your spouse cares waaaay more than you do, in which case: good call on getting married!
(e) You're a bandwagon-jumping, low-self-esteem weenie and scurry from Notre Dame to Miami to Ohio State to USC to Boise State depending on the year, the polls and the amount of water flooding into the ship.

If you can't be true to a school, at least be true to your own weaselly nature.

[…]

4. If you attended a lower-division or NAIA school, you're allowed to pick a D-I school of your choice. But you must consistently root for that school year in and year out, and it's preferred that the school be geographically close to you.

4a. Or you can just root for Appalachian State every week.

4b. Notre Dame? How very original.

[…]

9. You are allowed to root freely against the following schools for no specific reasons: Notre Dame; Notre Dame in their puke-green jerseys; Notre Dame when playing on "Triumph of the Will"-shaming propaganda house organ NBC; USC; any school that plays its fight song approximately 4,387 times per game like USC; Michigan; Miami; Ohio State; any school like Ohio State with a pretentious "the" in front of its name, because otherwise how would we know which Ohio State university they were talking about?; any school coached by Steve Spurrier; any school coached by Nick Saban. (ed: I’d add “any team from Florida” to this list, but that’s a minor quibble.)

You may have noticed that I’m in the 4b fan category. Given that I never went to college, I’m free to root for the school of my choice, under rules Four and 1a (d) above, even if that means I root for my former spouse’s school (The Second Mrs. Pennington is a Notre Dame alumna). And I have been an ND fan for nearly 30 years now and don’t foresee any change in that status on the near or far horizons. It’s way too late to change allegiances at this point in life. While we’re at it, I should mention I’m a fan of, and root for, at least three schools, depending on who’s playing whom: ND, Michigan (the ten year living-in-Detroit connection), and Air Force. For reasons that should be obvious now. The only time I’m torn is when ND plays Air Force…and I well and truly don’t know what to do during that game. Very traumatic, that.

So, to the author of “The Rules,” especially Rule 4b: Put a sock in it. I like ‘em, otherwise.

A Timely Update

In anticipation of tomorrow’s football games football orgy, I give you the Readers Updates to The Rules. There are some pretty good ones…and I’ll only give you the ones that made me laugh out loud (here, in this post)…

62. You are allowed to root for another school while your team is on probation. (STU_UNGAR1975)

62a. Except in the SEC. This would be way too confusing.

69. All fans are allowed to root for one service academy, but you must pick one. (terpman19)

69a. If you pick Air Force, you must call them the Zoomies.
(ed: Ummm…I’ll respectfully submit a corollary: “Unless you are IN the Air Force, or SERVED in the Air Force, or RETIRED from the Air Force. You will then call the team ‘Air Force.’”)

91. Unless you win the BCS title game, you are not the national champions. I don't care what the AP poll says. (egomaniac)

95. Any conference called "The Big Ten" that in fact has 11 teams must man up and kick one out. (htighe811)

95a. Any Big Ten team who loses to a Division I-AA team is the candidate to be kicked out.

100. Unless you matriculated and graduated from Stanford, Cal Tech, MIT or an Ivy League school, you may not use your alma mater's scholastic excellence as a valid excuse for crappy football. (That means you, Michigan, Notre Dame and Cal.) (winstoncounty)

By the way, the names in parentheses are the people that submitted the rule.

Oh. Almost forgot: GO Irish!!

Note:  ESPN's web site seems to be having some "issues" today.  I've tested and re-tested the links in the re-runs above and sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.  If they don't work for you... try this.