Top 10 Ways to Know a New Football Season Has Arrived

Are you ready for some football? Here are the top 10 ways to know a new football season – high school, college or pro are all fine –  has officially arrived!

1. the bass drum corps from the high school – located more than a couple miles from your house – rattles your windows every morning during marching band practice – and then breaks crystal and knocks picture frames off the wall every other Friday night at home games;

2. you find out where your neighbors moved from or went to college as flags are attached to car windows or hung from front porches (or both) every Saturday morning – of note: you will know when their favorite team has lost a big game when the flag comes down immediately after the game;

3. no more curling tournaments; no more bocci specials; no more cricket highlights from the New Zealand versus Barbados match are shown on ESPN 2 through 25;

4. coaches at every level of football stand before a row of microphones and talk about how tough their opening game against a team that hasn’t won a game in three years is going to be…with a straight face;

5. grown men who shouldn’t take off their shirts in public take of their shirts in public with a big block letter painted on their chest;

6. television ratings for major league baseball plummet – and no one outside New York City and Boston and whoever lives in one of the cities that has a shot of playing them cares;

7. even the most long suffering of fans – i.e. Cincinnati Bengals fans (the team I grew up watching) – believe this year is going to finally be different for their team (until after the first game is a blowout loss);

8. the skinny kid who majors (or plans to major) in atomic and molecular astrophysics puts on a Tiger outfit and becomes a rock star to the home fans;

9. fantasy draft parties are held in corporate meeting rooms after work hours with a group of eleven people who bring enough pages of notes to fill War and Peace – and a twelfth person who plans to draft the kicker from his alma mater in the first round;

10. fans who have never played a down of football get into heated – and well reasoned – arguments over the merits of cover two versus bump and run; three-four versus four-three; i-formation versus the spread; punting or going for it; 60’s Packers versus 80’s 49ers versus the 21st Century Patriots; and the current head coach versus the coach who got fired from someone else’s team last year.

Are you ready for some football?