College Football is Almost Back, and It Still Feels Like Christmas in August

I lived on campus at Ohio State for most of my time there. It's not like there weren't other options, but truth be told I really just wanted the convenience of being able to stumble to class in under ten minutes without having to give a whole lot of thought to basic things like transportation or hygiene.

The real appeal to living on campus, however, were college football Saturdays. Some coeds ingest heroic amounts of coffee to get their brains working, some partake in various illegal substances, but me? All I needed was a crisp fall day on campus as thousands of people in various states of intoxication screaming incomprehensible gibberish mere feet from my window.

So here was the ritual for a typical noon kickoff game during the Peak Tressel years:

• 9:00ish, wake up, head with my roommate to the least crowded dining hall, wait in line for the waffle maker, sit and stare into space
• 10:00, turn on College Gameday back at the dorm
• 10:18, get bored with College Gameday, head to High Street
• 10:30, walk down High and Lane with hordes of other Ohio State fans while appreciating the communal joy of a shared experience on a beautiful golden morning. Someone screams in my ear about Justin Zwick and I nod vigorously. Briefly consider giving ten dollars to a curbside vendor to buy a "LYDELL ROSS IS A BOSS" shirt before coming to my senses
• 11:00, eat a suspicious morning brat bought from a hairy guy in a cut-off shirt because there's no one to tell me not to
• 11:15, stick my head inside the Skull Session for five seconds, mostly to tell people that I go to Skull Sessions
• 11:40, get to my seat in the 'Shoe, having missed part of Script Ohio. Hope that I don't get excommunicated
• 12:00, spend the next three and a half hours happily watching offensive football of debatable quality and defensive football of excellent quality, while silently competing with the people around me for ass room on a bench
• 4:00-Monday morning, [REDACTED]

Those were some of the best times I've ever had, but any attempt trying to recreate some facsimile of that experience is a losing battle; getting old, getting a job, getting married, and starting a family all stand in the way of me having zero responsibilities and dicking around all weekend. Which I'm okay with! I like having a job, and I love my wife and kid, and wouldn't trade them for anything.

But I'm still fiercely protective of the purity of that memory.

I remember exactly where I was when I found out that Troy Smith got pinched for a $500 handshake with a booster. I was sitting in Mirror Lake Cafe, eating a pizza sub in front of one of the yellowed screens of the desktop computers they put out for students, when I read the SI headline and said something untoward. In the moment, I was furious at Troy Smith and the booster for potentially screwing up a significant part of my fall Saturdays. How dare they ruin my football watching and pizza sub eating experience? Don't they know how selfish that is of them?

I've thought about that moment a lot in recent years. College football has changed significantly, and will continue to change. "Three yards and a cloud of dust" is essentially dead. College coaches are no longer revered, unimpeachable saints. Players are speaking out in ways that they didn't dare to before. The amount of money in the game has risen exponentially, with student-athletes now being able to monetize themselves in ways that would make College Johnny choke on his lightly toasted hoagie roll.

But year after year, I come to this point in the offseason, just as excited as I ever was for the season to start. After writing about college sports for over a decade now, I can be generally cynical about how the sausage gets made, but it turns out that all that stuff I loved about college football almost 20 years ago really hasn't changed that much. You can still walk down High Street and buy dumb crap while high-fiving drunk people. "O-H" still elicits an "I-O" in a large mob of people trying to find their gate at Ohio Stadium. The Best Damn Band In The Land is still, in fact, the best damn band in the land.

Troy Smith getting a negligible amount of money from a booster didn't actually ruin anything (and now I honestly wish the dude got some more), but what I was really afraid of was something I loved morphing into something I wouldn't get excited about. Then, on the first game of the 2006 season that I attended, Smith did this:

When Ohio State plays Notre Dame in a few short days, I will be just as hyped as I would've been regardless of NIL, or billions of dollars of media broadcasting rights, or social media douchebros worming in ads for cryptocurrency in between tweets about Jaxon Smith-Njigba. Passes will be caught, cheers will be had, kickers will be lamented.

College football, believe it or not, will continue to be cool and good.