Two weekends ago, while visiting my girlfriend at James Madison for her birthday, I happened to stumble upon one of the greatest sports moments of this year. As I was driving back from a nice meal at Bob Evans, the only good restaurant in Harrisonburg apart from the bowling alley, I was flipping through the radio stations trying to find a college football game on. We stumbled across the JMU-Virginia Tech game and heard the score was 21-16, James Madison. What? What is going on in the world? Assuming the game wasn't on TV, we drove around Harrisonburg - not that there's much to really drive around - cheering in the car for the last 10 minutes of the game while we listened to, as ESPN studio host Rece Davis put it, James Madison's best work since the Federalist papers. And then, something I didn't expect happened. The minute after the clock hit triple zero, Harrisonburg erupted. Drivers honked for no apparent reason. People walked out of the apartments, screaming, waving JMU flags. People went down to the big intersection in the middle of campus and mobbed cars with chants of "J-M-U." They closed down half of the roads on campus because there were so many people. Somebody unsuccessfully tried to burn a Tech shirt.
The enthusiasm and the school spirit were palpable. But what struck me as we were driving back from participating in this quasi-riot is how much this kind of thing is limited to college football. No other sport, not even pro football, could produce this kind of excitement from fans.
That got me thinking. Perhaps, at the end of the day, college football is better than pro football. So I decided to do some comparisons between the two.
College football is full of traditions, pride and rivalries as old as the school themselves. (See: Army-Navy Game, South's Oldest Rivalry, Deep South's Oldest Rivalry, the four Holy Wars, and of course, The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party).
Pro football is full of invented drama and invented rivalries. (Who's really, really excited for the Raiders at Cardinals matchup this weekend?)
College football consumes entire states. All people talk about in Alabama the week before the Iron Bowl is one thing - football.
Pro football is consuming for all those fantasy sports fans, who watch games like the Raiders-Cardinals to see how many fantasy points Larry Fitzgerald can get them. How is that being a fan?
College football is dedication. A woman from South Carolina, Joan Renee Kirby, who died last week, made sure her visitation was scheduled "so that there won't be a conflict with the West Virginia Mountaineers football game." That literally was in her obituary.
Pro football is Albert Haynesworth not going to OTAs because apparently $32 million during a 13-month period isn't enough to convince him to play in a 3-4.
College football is Byron Leftwich being literally carried down the field by his offensive lineman, too hurt to walk but not too hurt to play.
Pro football is Ricky Williams taking a year off to study Ayurveda, an Indian system of holistic medicine, at the California College of Ayurveda in Grass Valley, Ca.
College football is Boise State-Oklahoma, complete with a Statue of Liberty, a halfback pass, a hook and ladder and an end-of-game proposal just to top it all off.
Pro football is a stupid overtime rule - no, I'm not just bitter after that Texans game ... why do you ask? - that allows a simple coin flip and a field goal decide who was going to the Super Bowl last year.
Sure, there are bad sides to college football. There's literally no way to defend the BCS. It makes almost no sense. All this stuff with the agent scandals and NCAA violations and returned Heisman trophies isn't great for the sport either. There are plenty of things I'd do differently if I was running it.
But there still is one fundamental difference between the two.
Before Hurricane Katrina, Saints owner Tom Benson was threatening to move the Saints unless he got a brand new stadium in New Orleans. Baltimore lost a team in the middle of the night. Los Angeles lost two teams in three years. At the end of the day, the NFL is about one thing: money.
In college, while people do care about money (see: Bowl Championship Series), they care about the fans, too. It's not like Mike London's going to move the team to Blacksburg because he wants a new stadium deal.
College football, and its teams, will always be there for you. And that, my friends, makes all the difference.
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