[...]... blocked; the Badgers recovered the ball in the end zone, winning the game and retaining a certain bronzed swine I come not to bury Kucek, but to embrace him, to elevate him as an example of why fall Saturdays pack more wackiness and drama than the 14 or so games they play the next day These guys don’t fully realize they are cogs in a multibillion-dollar business They still think they’re playing a game They’re... diluting the value of the Super Bowl and our ability to sell those rights to our partners.” Oh yeah I want to party with these guys Where the NFL is corporate and inconstant—with players and, every so often, entire franchises skipping town college football is steeped as deeply in tradition as the “corny dogs” (and Snickers bars and cheese curds and alligator cubes) are immersed in cooking oil at the Texas... signing a Top 10 recruiting class—this after the Irish had repeatedly finished outside the Top 20 Notre Dame would enter the 2006 season with an explosive offense and a No 2 AP ranking The Trojans, meanwhile, had worked their way to the cusp of college football history at the end of the 2005 season They were 17 seconds from becoming the first team ever to finish atop the AP poll for three years running But... my mother phoned with news that Mark had been cut by the Detroit Lions “That’s a shame,” sympathized Lou Holtz, with whom I shared the news, and who graciously feigned a recollection of No 67 of the BC Eagles “Your brother’s a fine football player.” This being Holtz, the word “brother’s” came out “brutherth.” As well documented as the coach’s lisp is the fact that he could be a son-of-a-bitch on the. .. in all its variegated splendor, the antidote to the corporate, clinical NFL, where the grail is parity, and a head coach needs a special waiver from the league to wear a suit on the sideline Indeed, college football is the opposite of the pinched, unsmiling bureaucratic No Fun League, which last January put the kibosh on a church’s plans to use a wall projector to show the Colts-Bears Super Bowl game,... players that they could play loose, because they had nothing to lose; that they were being written off, counted out, disrespected The truth is, they remained the most talented team in the Pac-10 and one of the three best in the country Truths that seemed unassailable at the start of the 2006 season—Rutgers will never win big; Ohio State is in a class by itself— would prove as leaky as the Notre Dame... postadolescents who do not, technically, do this for a living The NCAA limits the amount of time they can spend on football to 20 hours a week Football may be their job, but it’s not their only job They are between 18 and 22 years old They’ve got classes, they’ve got girlfriends, they’ve got brains that are not yet fully formed I am thinking, in this case, of the star wide receiver at Utah who— speaking of young... South Bend and Ann Arbor; East Lansing and Columbus; Coral Gables and Tallahassee; Tuscaloosa, Auburn, and Oxford; Norman and Lincoln; Corvallis and Eugene I’ve been to ’SC so many times that I can tell you the names of the original Wild Bunch, the members of the late-1960s defensive line immortalized by a bronze statue outside Heritage Hall (One of them is Al Cowlings, who played in the NFL, but achieved... through The Grove before kickoff is to be reminded that not all the talent is on the field Of course college football is selling sex; it just goes about it with more subtlety than the NFL, many of whose cheerleaders look like they should be pole-dancing at Scores.) College football tradition is the slightly less genteel atmosphere of the Red River Shootout, where I once spotted a woman in the crimson... pulls the eye to the north There above the reflecting pool is a massive, vibrantly colored mural called The Word of Life, a 163-foot rendering of the resurrected Christ better known by its more populist handle, “Touchdown Jesus.” In no particular hurry, I walk toward the pool and the Theodore Hesburgh Library, whose south-facing façade is brought to life by the most famous mosaic in sports What’s the . w0 h0" alt="" SATURDAY RULES Why College Football Outpasses, Outclasses, and Flat-Out Surpasses the NFL AUSTIN MURPHY To my father, J. Austin. State of the League addresses, you’d know that something happens to these guys when they get to the NFL. The joy is sucked out of the game for them as