September 9, 2004

It's great to be back at the start of another exciting football season.

I spent the past few months trying some new adventures.

I took a float trip through the Grand Canyon with my good friends Mike Tirico and Herb Street. I had a good time, and they said that they had never been on any rubber raft as bouyant as my stomach.

A few weeks after that I appeared on that quiz show "Jeopardy", taking on that guy who keeps on winning. I jumped out to an early shutout lead, then we got through that "Potent Potables" category and didn't do too well after that. In fact I now owe them $28,000. That guy who beat me sure can play that game, for a Bring'em Young Moron.

The big story in the off-season was the controversy over wide receiver Mike Williams from USC, who wanted to go play in the NFL. For some reason the NFL wouldn't let him play there. That makes little sense given how much they're expanding the league these days, they need all the guys they can get.

While I don't follow the NFL too closely, and I especially dislike NFL exhibition football, I have to admit that bad NFL practice games are better than no football at all. So I tuned in over the weekend and was a bit shocked at how many new expansion teams there are in the NFL.

This was especially true on Sunday, when I watched the new Louisville NFL franchise in action against a team from Kentucky. They've got so many teams now that it's starting to resemble the arena league, except for the NFL's crab-free cheerleaders.

On Sunday there was also a team from Las Vegas taking on the Tennessee Oilers (the only oil in Tennessee is in Steve McNair's jerry curl). The Vegas team even hired former South Carolina coaching legend John Robinson, which has got to be the most inspired bit of NFL hiring since the St. Louis Rams hired Bud Wilkinson away from Oklahoma.

It sounds like the NFL has figured out that NASACAR is so popular in the Southeast that they have to build up some football teams there too. My theory is that they're taking tried-and-true rivalries and shifting them to the NFL and adding as many southeastern teams as possible.

Just look at what they did to the Super Bowel runner up Carolina Panthers. They split them into four teams and named them after directions for easy tracking, so last weekend we got to watch North, South, East, and West Carolina.

Saturday night I tuned in the big FSU vs. Washington game. Now Washington's one of my favorite teams. But I couldn't understand why coach Joe Gibbs messed with the tradition and changed the team colors to something so garish. C'mon, Joe, they're the Redskins, not the Purpleskins. Get your mind out of the gutter.

And what's with Florida State playing teams like Washington and Miami? Doesn't coach Bowden know that his boys might suffer a lot of injuries playing the Redskins and the Dolphins in consecutive weeks?

At least FSU lucked out when ABC moved their clash with the Dolphins so they didn't have to play NFL teams on consecutive days. The networks are out of control. ABC clearly moved this game from Labor Day, when people are on vacation, to the next Friday in order to increase ratings.

The craziest scheduling of the weekend involved Ohio State. The Buckeyes took on Cincinnati in the afternoon, beating the Bengals quite handily. Then they flew down to Baton Rouge and played a night game against the Bayou Bears of Louisiana State. OSU really took it to LSU and the forces of (Nick) Satan, building up a nice lead, but eventually fatigue got to OSU. You'd think Coop would have figured that out before scheduling two games in one day.

Now apparently this LSU-OSU game also went into overtime. I'm still trying to get a good grip on these overtime rules, because they seem to keep on changing. People keep on telling me it's not a sudden death overtime, but then that kicker missed the game-winning field goal and OSU lost, and from what I saw, his death was pretty sudden. I didn't know those football players could swing baseball bats so accurately.

Apparently not all the games were NFL exhibitions or college regular season games. Colorado had an exhibition game against Colorado State. Colorado State tried to win on the last play of the game by running it into the end zone rather than kicking a tying field goal. In exhibition games teams try to avoid a boring overtime even if it means risking a loss. You know that a smart woman like Sunny Lubick wouldn't have done something as stupid as letting the clock run out while on the 1 yard line if it was a real game.

Anyway, this weekend begins the real college season. It's the 3rd anniversary of the night that I forgot to wear my neck clip on "GameNight", which led to them making me do my broadcasts from behind a black screen. It's the 25th anniversary of ESPN. And it's the 50th anniversary of the death of my first liver.