September 5, 1999

It's great to be back to share my observations on the college football season with all my fans out there.

I certainly have enjoyed all the action over the past week. I'm about to sit back in my easy chair and watch that Arizona at Dallas exhibition game on Fox. I don't quite understand why the Cowboys are playing in that little bandbox of a stadium instead of that big one with the hole in the roof (the roof that covers the fans but lets all the rain in). And I never realized that the Cowboys' throwback uniforms looked just like old TCU gear.

The biggest game of the weekend had to be the one in State College, where Akron tried to shake off the Jerry Faust era and take on JoePa and his many minions. The Nittany Lions have quite a powerhouse this year, they play and look like some of Leahy's great teams at Notre Dame, except JoePa finally did get rid of the leather helmets a couple years ago while keeping the rest of those 40's-style outfits.

As expected, Akron made quite a game of it for 10 minutes or so, then Penn State started moving up and down and all over, scoring repeatedly, just like a Cleveland hooker on dexadrine (maybe that's how the PSU stadium got its name). By the end it was a 70-24 blowout and the only question was whether LaVar will win two or three Heisman trophies (thereby tying the record of former NFL great Ron Powlus).

The other big story was Michigan coach Floyd Carr's complaints about Notre Dame getting an early start on the season. Hey, Floyd, it's not ND's fault that they were smart enough to be practice for the season while everyone at Michigan was busy going on fishing trips.

Carr said that Notre Dame gained an advantage by starting earlier. In reality, I have to agree with him to some degree. Notre Dame got to work out the kinks in the heat of the Kansas game and that prepared them much better for the Michigan game.

Just look at the statistics: Against Kansas, in 90-degree weather, nine ND band members fainted and several others were seen vomiting. Against Michigan, after the conditioning from the Kansas game, again in 90-degree weather, none of the band members fainted and only one regurgitated, and that was probably due to eating one of those lousy Midwestern bagels before the game.

Meanwhile, Michigan was at a huge disadvantage. It was their first game of the year, unlike ND, and you could tell. Their band comes out and forms the block "M" and plays that Michigan victory march but one whole leg of the "M" was missing due to about 50 of their kids being rushed to area hospitals.

So instead of a block "M" it looked like one of them Chinese characters, apparently it was the one that says "Mao Sucks". The game got televised overseas and the Chinese leadership wasn't happy and took decisive action. Let's just say I hope there are no hard feelings among the 5,000 or so non-radiated survivors in Los Angeles. LA isn't a big college football town anyway, so it's no great loss.

Band formations have a long but not quite as explosive history in college football. Spelling things out on the field helped give the band members some exercise (nothing is more disgusting than an out of shape fat guy sinking under the weight of a tuba) and helped educate the remedial readers in the audience.

The first band to really combine exercise and education was the Syracuse University marching band. They actually did formations presenting excerpts from all the Dick and Jane readers to help educate the rather illiterate population of Syracuse. So the band would spell out "Run, Spot, Run" and other band members would make a formation that looked like a doggie running across the field. The illiterates would then learn a whole new useful phrase and would go back to their front porch, down a few more tall ones, and yell at stray dogs.

In order to help the fans read the words, they used a bouncing ball. It was actually a guy dressed up as a bright orange bouncing ball and he'd run along the top side of the formation so the fans would know which words to say and learn how to read that way. After a while the guy dressed as a ball got tired, so they tried to build a huge scoreboard and swing him from ropes along the formations and that seemed to work all right. Eventually this bouncing ball became the beloved Syracuse mascot, the orange testicle.

Unfortunately, making these very intricate formations required about 3,000 or so people, so the field was covered with fat guys with tubas. That caused damage to the grass, so eventually they had to give up the idea of teaching all the illiterates in Syracuse how to read through use of a marching band.

Our marching bands are a lot smaller than in the early days yet they still provide a tremendous amount of entertainment at college football games. Now if only we could find a way to educate the idiot football fans in upstate New York who can't even read the menu at Taco Bell.