The 2012 College Football Season

While the Aryan Brotherhood assures us to be good Germans in Tampa, the sons and daughters of sharecroppers see their only rubber pissing buckets filled with Gulf water in Louisiana.  Bain Capital and Occupy Wall Street.  A generation of PTSD-addled veterans returning and the Big Topic is repealing health care.  A burgeoning national debt and clamors for tax breaks.  Global warming.  A forecast of droughts and a decline in food production.  Greece.  Israeli settlements.  And this is all before we have to start worrying about the Great Race Wars and whoring our fruit-bearing daughters out to the merchant class of Chengdu.

Thank the Great Spirit we can divert ourselves with a little collegiate gridiron for the next thirteen weeks.  For some of us, we'll even get Bowl Season.  Nope, nothing wrong there.  It's just another wholesome season of predominately-black athletes risking limb and Parkinson's to appease the boosters of not-all-that-formerly all-white institutions.  With enough heart and perseverance, these kids just might make it to their 3.3 years in the Big League.  For the losers, the world is theirs for the taking, so long as the world continues to give itself out freely to graduates in Sports Management with 2.67 GPAs.  For most of us, we'll remember them while they're here. 

Soothesay, shall we? 

Alabama is, by far, bar none, the best team in the country.  We are in the midst of witnessing what may be the greatest dynastic stretch this sport will see for the next century.  It will be a generation before someone else can walk into a living room between the Arlingtons and convince a young man to strap on pads on play the way that Nick Saban can.  Until he retires, every defensive starter will be destined for the Big League or jail, with a select few making it to both.  However, playing in Death Valley at night, one year after winning the title and a fateful teabagging, they go down to LSU.  They make and win the title as a one loss team (LSU will lose twice).

Michigan is everybody's Cinderella Big Ten pick.  The problem is Denard Robinson's durability, especially after a cracked rib or sternum after suicidal runs into the brick wall of the Alabama defensive line in game one.  Michigan State wins that division.  A two-loss, not-altogether impressive Wisconsin wins the league and loses a third consecutive Rose Bowl.

USC will beat Oregon twice.  They'll also lose at least one game to a lower tier opponent in such a dogshit fashion that they'll nearly be disqualified on style points alone.  Voters are so desperate to see their resurgence that they are still selected for the title game where Surfer Boy Barkley, fresh off winning the Heisman, gets his shit pushed in for all the football world to see by the Alabama defense.

This is the year Notre Dame.....nope.  8-4.  Or whatever.  It's getting to the point where I could almost foresee myself, some day, growing tired of their consistent irrelevance.  Additional, heavy emphasis on almost. 

This is not the year to attend a Penn State football game.  It may not be That Year for another five.  Every Penn State home game will be so saturated with the fraternity-level jingoism and me-against-the-world victimhood that it'll be too gross of a display of humanity to support in good conscious.  Every road game, the traveling Penn State contingent will get taunted.  Viciously.  Irreverently.  Cleverly.  The taunters will be bros.  The taunted will be bros, but bros with a chip on their shoulder.  Don't be surprised if there are fistfights at every single in-conference Penn State road game this season.

Welcome back, Florida State.  Kinda.  I am hopeful they will play Oregon in the Ships Passing In The Night Bowl.  Oregon will be going down, but not really, just stuck at a very high plateau somewhere below Championship Caliber.  Florida State is about to ascend to that rank.  With Oklahoma and USC, they could make a pretty solid Henry Clay/Hubert Humphrey/Bob Dole/Mitt Romney Rushmore.   

This will be Mack Brown's last season at the wheel in Texas.  The fanbases of Georgia, Tennessee, Clemson, Nebraska, and, to an extent, Auburn and Florida, will receive enough to have their coach for another year, but not really want their coach for another year.  Their will be a lot of good jobs available in December 2013. 

Texas A&M and Missouri will both have losing seasons.  West Virginia will place no better than fourth in the Big XII.  Washington is two seasons away from being relevant in the National Conversation.  Most of the controversy in the coming season will be on the field and about the BCS formula, though a slight tangential conversation will occur about the feudalistic arrangement of big money and unpaid athletes.  At least one coach, probably Mike Leach, will get a DUI in October.  Urban Meyer will last no more than three seasons at Ohio State, to fair-to-middling success.  LSU is projecting bearish in the long run, at least by their standards.  Miami will never run a clean program.  Though it won't have the spotlight of their brothers to the west, the SEC East will have the most interesting race for the next half decade.  Colorado, which will likely do much worse, will go 7-6, including a bowl game win over a shitty Big East team. 

This week's three fifty dollar wagers: South Carolina (-7) over Vanderbilt, Colorado (-6.5) over CSU, Oregon (-35.5) over Arkansas State.

Leaving New York

In little more than four months time, I will know what it is like to die.  I write not of corporeal expiration, inshallah, though neither do I intend for this to be dismissed as hyperbole.  I'm talking above the rooftops.  One helicopter-mounted 35 mm camera slowly rising and simultaneously panning out across a great urban expanse into a dissolve.  Cue music.  Roll credits.  End of show.

Or, not at all.  Rather than dissolve into the azure blue of the surrounding waters or gritty gray of an iconic skyline, the camera goes....everywhere.  Split-screen.  Picture-in-picture.  Times infinite.  We've got barked bartering in Chinatown and sunlit strolling in Soho; exposed chest hairs in Chelsea and construction on the Verrazano.  Tens of thousands of dour faces in the subway and enough public urination between all five boroughs to fill one duty officer's summons book in that one moment alone.  And what has happened to our departed hero?  Nobody knows.  And if they did, good riddance they would say.  One more tiny room for the next arriviste and their big city delusion.  One more vacancy in the service sector.  One less occupied seat on the G.

Sadness, there will be some, but even that will be more isolated than queers in Idaho and come with a faster expiration date than dairy.  As I imagine the reaction of loved ones some (inshallah) distant day after The Real One, I know it to be genuine.  I can feel the Kleenex moisten and see the hands shake, but I also know that among even the most fervent mourners, after the ceremony, after the ashes are spread, there will be a time to eat.  And I can only picture their attention on the Burger King drive thru menu board to be total and their deliberations thorough.  There is a time to reflect.  And then it's time to rejoin the world in its great big damn hurry.

New York will still be New York when I'm pushing southbound to New Orleans and the next of whatever passes for a Phase in my life.  That's why we move here.  We come from the corners and crevices of the globe, from happy families and broken homes and decide that this inhumane spit at the end of the Hudson will absorb us and make us whole.  Eight million attention-starved only children, craving anonymity and locking ourselves behind doormen and padlocks and private wifi and grieving that nobody pays us any attention.  Most, if not all, believe that we can leave our mark on the city that has always been under construction and never respected a burial ground.  Pshaw.  We walk around with the imprint of the tire's tread on our bodies and still believe.  

And so to leave is to resign, to admit....well, I won't quite go there.  A full seven years and it's too far gone to know what ambitions lurked inside myself upon arrival.  I never thought I would ring the bell or cut any sort of public ribbon.  I never wanted the Upper East Side and I sure as shit didn't want to discover my full potential at polo.  I do know that I didn't imagine myself digging and clawing to get out just as feverishly as I did to get in.  There are no medals for endurance on the treadmill.

So when I turn my head and cough, the self-diagnosis is a metastasizing case of Get The Fuck Out.  I don't need the charts to know it's terminal.  But you can think of my case as an almost lighthearted one, kind of like the guy in the commercial for the retirement fund walking along the beach.  It's nearing sunset and I'm wearing a striped shirt, content with the mortal footprints left in the sand behind me.  I'm leaving on my own terms.  Smiling, laughing, able to remain but electing not to.  I make no claims about leaving as king of the hill of these gritty grids, but I wasn't entirely castrated either.  New York: let's just call this a draw.