Football Kicks Off

Football season is here.  College kicked off a couple of days before Labor Day weekend and the official NFL start was a week later.  Most big time college football seasons begin their seasons with what is euphemistically called “cupcakes” (to steal a line from College Basketball and Dick Vitale).  Schools from smaller conferences (the non Bowl Championship Automatic qualifier conferences) are usually playing road games the first few weeks of college football.  The smaller schools call these games where they go into the big name schools to play as “payday” games.  Two or three of these games each year and a smaller school can almost pay for its entire football program.  Most of the time, the smaller school just signs a one year contract with the big school to play although occasionally the bigger name school might sign a “two and one” contract where the smaller school plays two games at the bigger school and receives one home game with the larger school in return.  If the larger school is feeling magnanimous.  Or maybe they sign a four game contract where two games are at the larger school’s location while the other two games are at a neutral site.

Later in the college season there tend to be a lot of various types of rivalry games, often as the final game of the year but occasionally there are big rivalry games in the first or second week of the college season.  The early season rivalry games usually are between schools located fairly close to each other but they play in different conferences.

Rivalry games, whenever they occur, are the games most likely to have angry fans taking the baseball bat to the garage door if their team loses to the rival.  By having early season rivalry games, it can allow the garage door repairman to start ramping up to the repair needs for garage doors later in the year.  Starting slowly and building as the year goes along.

Most every year though, there are a few upsets along the way where the smaller school, usually one from the less well known “Football Bowl Subdivision” (the schools formerly known as 1A Football) conferences go into the big name schools and win a game or two that they shouldn’t.  And an even rarer occurrence is when a school from the “Football Championship Subdivision (formerly known as 1AA) will go into the larger school’s stadium and upset the home team.  When that happens, the coach of the larger school should probably be updating his resume and the garage door repairman gets a few more early phone calls to come repair or replace the damaged garage door.