The Last College Football Post of the Season

If it felt like the biggest moment in the 2025 college football season when it happened, in retrospect, it was even bigger, the one preserving the Indiana Hoosiers’ immaculate season, helping to ensure they would become the first and only other team in the sport to finish 16-0 since Yale in 1894 when the Bulldogs walloped the likes of Tufts, Trinity (CT), and the Volunteer (NY) Athletic Association. Trailing Penn State on the road by four points with 36 seconds left and facing 3rd and goal, Indiana wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. caught quarterback Fernando Mendoza’s game-winning touchdown pass in the back of the end zone, a prosaic description of a catch so remarkable that it truly sounded like Fox play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson had suddenly been confronted with a multitude of the heavenly host. It’s the most natural thing in the world to see such a thing and reactively declare, “That’s the greatest catch I’ve ever seen,” to reach for hyperbole first and let hindsight come later. The thing was, even in hindsight the play demanded hyperbole. He caught that? By managing to get both feet in bounds? While being (legally) pushed out of bounds by the defender? We live in an era of outrageous athleticism and specialized wide receiver gloves that have turned incredible one-handed catches into a dime a dozen, almost. No one, however, has done what Cooper did, in his unbelievable body control, seeming to levitate like Chow Yun-Fat and Zhang Ziyi atop the trees in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” 

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There has never been a college football season like 2025. I mean that literally. Indiana, the all-time losingest major CFB program entering the season, won its first national championship. In addition, 2025 marked the first one that schools were able to pay their players directly by allowing them to share in the revenue their feats of strength have been helping to generate for decades. It is unquestionable progress even if that progress has blurred the lines between college and professional football to virtually nothing as the ability to compensate players taken in tandem with the so-called transfer portal have in effect created something like unregulated free agency. And if that means modern college football often resembles the worst parts of the NBA, where transactions and front office maneuvering drive discourse more than the games themselves, you can’t be mad at the nominal student athletes. The powers-that-be have been reaping the profits and breaking their contracts for years; now, finally, the players are gettin’ theirs. 

The author, journalist, and all-around college football fanatic Michael Weinreb has frequently noted how the sport tends to reflect America, and so, it only makes sense that given how present-day America feels as if it is spinning off its axis, so, too, does college football. The season has become too long, conferences rarely make historical or geographic sense, and the whole enterprise increasingly feels as if we really are all just rooting for laundry. That axis-spinning sensation was only exacerbated by the second season of the 12-team playoff, one that has all but rendered conference championships moot as these nonsensical confederations are now so overcrowded a true round-robin format is often impossible, necessitating arcane tiebreakers. That is how a 7-5 Duke team played for the ACC title rather than 10-2 Miami, and though Duke subsequently won the conference championship in an upset over Virginia, Miami was, nevertheless, selected for the playoff, and advanced to the national championship game, while the ACC champs went to the Sun Bowl. Did you follow all that? (I did not even mention that Miami just signed Duke’s quarterback Darian Mensah from the transfer portal and that now Duke is suing Mensah for breaking his NIL contract and does Mensah still get to keep his ACC Championship ring?) 

Once, going to a bowl game was cause for celebration, but now these utterly unique postseason exhibitions are mere television inventory, consolation prizes some teams are not even interested in accepting. Both Iowa State and Kansas State said thanks but no thanks and when Notre Dame was not selected for the playoff, they declined a bowl game invitation too, leading so many who had spent the entire season framing it strictly through the prism of the playoff while reducing bowl games to gum on their shoe to hypocritically scold the Fighting Irish for treating bowl games the exact same way. As the idiom goes, pick a lane!

Notre Dame’s decision shone a harsh light on just how much the 12-team playoff has altered not just what is most important within the sport but everyone’s expectations surrounding it. Used to be, success in this sport could be more relative, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with it. Even though college football has 136 teams and only 12 slots to go around for its postseason tournament, the new mentality too often is playoff or bust, one intensified by revenue sharing and the transfer portal evening the playing field. Indeed, Indiana is Exhibit A. If the woebegone Hoosiers could flip the script in 2 years, why, so many teams no doubt wonder, can’t we do the same? It spurred a rash of mid-season coach firings, both bluebloods and non-bluebloods alike, and the market’s most desirable candidate, University of Mississippi head coach Lane Kiffin, was a social media savvy narcissist who was only too happy to play it up. More than the Heisman Trophy race, really, the Kiffin saga became the season’s ultimate subplot, effectively transforming him into the sport’s main character, right down to the end as his team made the playoff and the decision of whether he would stay or go (he went, taking the LSU job) took center stage. 

Ah, but that’s the thing about college football. Lane Kiffin might have been a black hole, but he could not swallow the sport, and though anyone who watched a Mississippi game during the season knew their success stemmed as much from their quarterback, the jauntily named Ferris State transfer Trinidad Chambliss, in their breathtaking Sugar Bowl quarterfinal clash with Georgia, Chambliss reclaimed the spotlight for his team as absolutely as the Virginia student body swarmed its field in the instantaneous aftermath of their beloved Cavaliers equally breathtaking (then) upset of Florida State in September. Chambliss had big numbers but more than that, he had big plays, reaching the quarterbacking zenith where the burden of what’s at stake surrenders to the joy of performance. The game went late into the January 1st night, awakening echoes of glorious New Years Days of old, and ended with what was tantamount to a Twilight Zone episode.

All the college football sickos who stayed up to watch the end of the Hawaii Bowl on Christmas Eve night, meanwhile, can provide the umpteenth reminder that something ostensibly meaningless can feel like nothing in the world matters more, and the though Indiana and Ohio State 1 versus 2 B1G title tilt was just a prelude to the playoff and not an (un)officially designated Game of the Century, it felt like a Game of the Century, nevertheless. I wouldn’t have thought it could be topped, but the national championship game did, a title fight in which defenses owned the first half, forcing the offenses to up the ante up in a slobberknocker of a second half in which the referees essentially swallowed their whistles whole, living the ideal of Letting Them Play, and Indiana demonstrated true greatness by overcoming extraordinary pressure from a valiant Miami defense to find a way by playing how they had all season long – unafraid.

That fearlessness stemmed from head coach Curt Cignetti’s glowering bravado, but it also stemmed from the confident exuberance of Mendoza, and you saw both in the game’s biggest play when leading 17-14 early in the 4th quarter and facing a 4th down and 4 at Miami’s 12, Indiana eschewed settling for a field goal to have Mendoza run a delayed draw up the middle. Can you have your Heisman Moment after you have already won the Heisman? I guess so, because Mendoza did, as his 12-yard run to the promised land was like Willie Beamen’s run at the end of “Any Given Sunday” but if it had been done by a lanky quarterback from the 30s or 40s, like Sammy Baugh, the kind of gridiron maneuver that typically works best when you’re 9 years old and slaloming through imaginary defenders in your backyard. Instead, the Heisman Trophy winner manifested that imaginary play in real life. As he dove, stretching the ball across the goal line, it felt a lot like Omar Cooper Jr.’s catch back in November. There is so much outside noise in college football these days, but those few seconds when they were in the air, Mendoza and Cooper and the game itself seemed to hover above it, impervious. 

The Last College Football Post of the Season

If it was a fun college football season, it was also a long one, not least because it essentially tacked on a whole extra month for the first go-round of the 12-team playoff which kicked off December 20th and ended January 20th. It didn’t feel anti-climactic, exactly, but it also felt less special because unlike New Year’s Days of yore, college football didn’t have last Monday all to itself. Sour grapes of one traditionalist aside, I’m sure it was plenty special to the Ohio State Buckeyes who won the inaugural expanded hootenanny and, by extension, college football’s national championship even after their talent-laden roster flirted with apathy the whole regular season. In any other year, the Buckeyes would have been out of the running, if not after their dramatic one-point defeat to Oregon in October than certainly after their epic spitting the bit against arch-rival Michigan in late November, a 13-10 choke job and their fourth straight loss to the hated team from up north that seemed to leave them mentally finished. Yet, in this new world of an NCAA Football Tournament (Winter Wildness?), where March bracketology buzzwords with gross white-collar connotations like resume become paramount, Ohio State’s body of work (bleh) was still good enough to gain entry and engendered the deepest, drollest of ironies. That is, they were in the place 121 other teams wished they were, that coaches would be placed on the hot seat for not getting to, and yet, because of that loss to Michigan, here was Buckeye coach Ryan Day in the playoff but on the hot seat himself with nothing less than a national championship or bust mandate. 

Whether the Michigan game finally set them free, or just teed them off, the Buckeyes finally met their massive potential in the playoff by obliterating Tennessee in round one and then getting revenge by steamrolling Oregon in a Rose Bowl quarterfinal. And in the semifinal against Texas, defensive lineman Jack Sawyer steamrolled Longhorn quarterback Quinn Ewers on one electrifying, insane scoop and score play that turned a 21-14 game Texas on the verge of tying into a 28-14 win, the kind of play that leaves you laughing from sheer bewildered delight as it’s happening. In the championship against fellow Midwesterners Notre Dame, meanwhile, Ohio State appropriately demonstrated each half of its dual identity, roaring out to a 31-7 lead so emphatically it looked over early before getting stuck in the mud as the Fighting Irish clawed back to within 31-23. Fittingly, the Buckeyes sealed it by ignoring Day’s misguided tendency to cosplay Woody Hayes and act tough, as he did against Michigan, and air it out, a deep ball to stud freshman receiver Jeremiah Smith in one-on-one coverage that did not score a touchdown but earned a first down to set up a field goal to seal victory. The play was appropriately symbolic, suggesting they could essentially do whatever they wanted so long as they remembered they could essentially do whatever they wanted and not so on edge as to suddenly forget. 

Frankly, we could not have a better case study for the first NCAA Football Tournament victor than this Ohio State team. In this brave new world of so-called Name, Image, and Likeness, in which players can profit from their personal brand, meaning schools can pay them, few disbursed more NIL funds than the Buckeyes, a reported $20 million to sculpt the eventual champs. The expanded playoff might provide more access for more non-bluebloods, like Arizona State and Boise State, but perhaps it also ensures that in the end, the richest cream will just rise to the top. More than that, though, Ohio State’s ninth national championship will always be inseparable from its loss to Michigan. That is not to say their title comes with an asterisk; it is not hollow or illegitimate. But it does bear a certain spiritual ball and chain. Jack Sawyer said it in so many words: “I won’t ever get over that loss.” Does the championship outweigh it? That is for each player and coach to decide, and it probably does, or they will probably say it does, though deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties I also suspect that they will always wonder if that’s true. And if that means the tension between the game’s regional roots and national ambitions has not yet tilted entirely toward the latter, it’s victory enough.

Time will tell if this national title is victory enough for the ultra-successful yet much-maligned Ryan Day. Though he has not always made things easy on himself, Day has been in some cases been treated truly callously and is deserving of a victory lap of the whole state in the manner of a 19th-century Christmas, demanding to be let into homes flying OSU flags and requesting a celebratory Rhinegeist Truth IPA in each one. Even so, he will probably be the first to tell you that “(n)ext year it’ll all be forgotten,” to quote the immortal “Mean” Joe Greene after the Pittsburgh Steelers won their fourth Super Bowl in six years to cap the Steel Curtain dynasty. “It’ll be, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ A vicious, vicious cycle.” 

The Great Heisman Race of 1997

The sixteenth entry of the fourth season of ESPN’s apparently never-ending 30 for 30 documentary series “The Great Heisman Race of 1997” is named for what became that season’s showdown between Michigan Wolverine Charles Woodson and Tennessee Volunteer Peyton Manning to be named the most outstanding player in college football. As a movie, it’s better than most of these now definitively average offerings in so much as director Gentry Kirby eschews talking heads and modern context to construct his film entirely from archival footage. It’s an approach I prefer, though in coming close to exclusively employing ESPN clips, going so far as using old College Gameday player profiles to explain his subjects, the whole thing starts to feel a little too much like a lengthy episode of College Gameday itself, and crucially lacks any larger meaning, just a nostalgia trip. And though I might be criticizing, I am not entirely complaining. Where college football is concerned, I’m not necessarily opposed to a nostalgia trip. And as someone who happened to be on the campus of the University of Iowa during that banger of a 1997 CFB season, four months I both wish I could have back for several reasons and would not want back in any way, shape, or form, my foremost takeaway from “The Great Heisman Race of 1997” was, hey, remember when Iowa running back Tavian Banks was briefly a Heisman contender?

picture of my TV

Look at that. There he is, wedged between two future NFL Hall of Famers and ahead of two future high profile NFL busts. (Banks was drafted by the Jacksonville Jaguars and his professional career was almost over before it began on account of injury.) Indeed, Banks had a September to remember, gaining almost 900 yards and scoring 13 touchdowns in 4 games...against inferior competition. In their first game in October against #7 Ohio State, Banks basically got skunked and that was it, unwantedly adding his name to the illustrious, in a manner of speaking, list of so-called September Heisman winners. And so even if I told myself I would not subject you, extremely frustrated Cinema Romantico reader, to another college football post until August, sorry, but “The Great Heisman Race of 1997” only interested me in so much as wanting to count down my Top 5 September Heisman winners.

My Favorite September Heisman Winners:

5. Tavian Banks, Iowa, 1997. In retrospect, he was never as cool as Ronnie Harmon. 

4. David Klingler, Houston, 1991. More of an August Heisman, really. At the controls of a semi-infamous lawless frontier of an offense and relentlessly hyped in the preseason, Klingler hurled six touchdown passes in his first game against overmatched Louisiana Tech before Houston was clobbered by The U in their second game. His Heisman campaign sunk like a stone.

3. Jacory Harris, Miami, 2009. Harris was more electrifying in three September games than his fellow Hurricane Gino Toretta was the whole season in 1992 when he really did win a Heisman Trophy.

2. Kyle Orton, Purdue, 2004. Not enough people, it seems to me, remember that the future NFL journeymen, and so-called Altoona Gunslinger, really, honestly, truly was atop all the Heisman straw polls early in the fall of 2004 before it came crumbling down. 

1. Denard Robinson, Michigan, 2010, 2011. He could never finish the deal, and militant football coaches would tell you that it’s all about finishing. But then, Gaudí did not finish the Sagrada Família, and one could make an argument that there was never a better college football player than September Denard Robinson. 

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 11 redux

December 31, 2000 (Independence Bowl): Mississippi State - 43 Texas A&M - 41 (OT)

Despite it being compromised by the modern world and its creep of instant communication and remote work, there remain few things more illustrative of joyful ephemera than a snow day. The surrounding world and all its demands and noise cease, and a little space opens up just for you. You don’t even have to seize the day; if anything, it’s preferable to let the day slide right on by. My favorite snow day was January 26, 1996, my senior year of high school, when Des Moines, Iowa was engulfed with 13.7 inches of snow, still a single day record for the state capital. School was called off, of course, and my most vivid memory of that Friday is looking out my upstairs bedroom at some point during the afternoon and seeing the lights of our neighbor’s red pickup truck crawling down the street from the east through whiteout conditions. He finally reached the edge of his driveway, blocked by such a sizable snowbank that it appeared virtually impenetrable, and stopped to size up the situation for a moment before gunning the engine. He had to reverse and then hit this snowbank, I don’t know, nine, ten, eleven times before he broke through and reached his garage. I had a front row seat for the whole show, and it was riveting, watching someone else brave the elements while I enjoyed the elements without having to go out in them. Nothing is better than watching snow falling through the window; nothing is worse than digging your car out from the snow and realizing someone is watching you do it through their window.

“From the start,” Dan Jenkins wrote in Sports Illustrated of a snowy Bengals and Steelers showdown in Cincinnati in 1976, “it was one huge argument for playing football under a roof.” “It was like a nightmare,” Ohio State halfback Vic Jankowicz said of his team’s 1950 Snow Bowl against Michigan, played during that year’s so-called Great Appalachian Storm. “My hands were numb.” “It was the kind of day,” said Michigan’s Chuck Ortmann of the same game, “you wouldn’t even open the door to bring in the newspaper.” Many years later, Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Torrey Smith unceremoniously deemed football in the snow as “trash.” Undoubtedly this view stemmed from his team’s game against the Minnesota Vikings in 2013, played in a blizzard and, later, on a sheet of ice. It was the same game, however, prompting Old Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky to argue that the sport was best in blizzardy conditions, at least for viewers at home, “where football is meant to be enjoyed,” Petchesky wrote, “snuggled up with their snacks and their heat and root(ing) for slippery chaos,” like me watching my neighbor duke it out with a snowdrift.

But Petchesky wrote something else about snow in that blog, calling it “evocative of only good things, like canceled school and Christmastime,” and how “(i)t invites play.” That’s a word worth lingering over, that last one, play. Because the more competitive football becomes as it moves up the ranks from amateur to faux amateur to professional, the more it invokes terrifying words like violence, and war, and life. It ceases to be something you would play in the backyard with your friends. And if snow often becomes a conduit to cozy nostalgia, to holidays and snow days gone by, so does it soften the brutal nature of football, a simultaneous convenient and inconvenient truth that Marvin Newman saw for Sports Illustrated all the way back in 1958, writing, “A snowstorm softens the usually vibrant sounds that rise from a stadium on an autumn afternoon and lends a dreamlike quality to the action on the field. Clouds of snowflakes blanketing the players seem to lessen the impact of the tackle, tug at the pace of action until it seems to occur in slow motion.” Like King David pleading to be made whiter than snow, so many white flakes on the gridiron has a similar effect, cleansing us of our complicity in the game’s savagery, even if that absolution is always short-lived.

If there have been several versions of colloquial Snow Bowls, making it difficult to pinpoint the precise criteria to determine the preeminent one, we can still establish the 2000 Independence Bowl as unique on account of its two participants, Mississippi State and Texas A&M, hailing from below the Mason Dixon Line and facing off in a place, Shreveport, LA, where winter weather tends to occur as rain or sleet. Demonstrating both good cheer and wicked humor, the weather gods conspired for a winter storm on December 31, 2000, to not only take the form of snow but to begin right as kickoff of the Independence Bowl approached, transforming Independence Stadium into a winter wonderland, a phrase ESPN play-by-play announcer Mark Jones uses straight away, predictable, perhaps, but pertinent, nevertheless, innately foreshadowing a game deserving of the label. Snow accumulates on the brims of the coach’s caps, and a grounds crew accustomed merely to managing rain struggles to keep the hashmarks clear, meaning the field vanishes for large swaths of the game, causing touchdowns to seemingly appear from nowhere. Mississippi State disappears, too, inadvertently getting into the spirit of things by busting out their rare all-white uniforms at just the wrong time.

Appropriately, the first play from scrimmage is a Mississippi State fumble, foreshadowing myriad ball-handling problems for the Bulldogs, while the game’s most crucial play is Texas A&M quarterback Mark Farris heedlessly tossing an interception into the wind and snow near his own goal line toward the game’s end, allowing Mississippi State an easy route to tie the score and send the contest to overtime. Not to sell Farris short. He also hits a 42-yard touchdown pass just before halftime, evocative of a game in which scores are not eked out despite the adverse weather but ripped off in big, glorious chunks, Mississippi State’s Dontae Walker with 40 and 32-yard runs and Texas A&M’s Bethel Johnson with a 35-yard catch and run. His six-foot, 275 lb. Aggie compatriot Ja’Mar Tombs, meanwhile, en route to MVP with 195 yards and 3 touchdowns on the ground, barely seems bothered by the conditions, Bulldog defenders looking like little kids on ice just learning to skate and struggling to keep up with this maroon-clad polar bear gliding toward the end zone, again. Indeed, if so many snow bowl accounts suggest how the games were hardly games at all, this feels like a game and a half, living out the wacky weather rather than being constrained by it, evoked in that idiosyncratic score, 43-41, that comes about because Mississippi State converts an ultra-rare 2-point conversion by way of blocking Texas A&M’s extra point attempt in overtime and running 98 yards the other way, complete with a madcap midfield lateral.

If at another time, on a different day, in some other place, a game pitting the third-place teams in the Big 12 South and the SEC West with identical run-of-the-mill 7-4 records would be forgotten, the 2000 Independence Bowl proved unforgettable, certainly more rememberable than the dreary national championship game played three nights later, a testament to the symbolic transformational nature of snow. In that way, its New Year’s Eve evening time slot was apropos. After all, the 2000 American Electoral fiasco had only been rectified, in a manner of speaking, a couple weeks earlier, and snow falling on a bowl game literally named for the birth of America, christened in the year of the United States Bicentennial, felt like a new beginning. Then again, the year 2000 naturally beget the year 2001, a bad one in America and one from which America still has not quite seem to have recovered, as present events both home and abroad suggest, as if we are trapped, the invaluable culture writer Molly Lambert has surmised, glitching back to 2001 forever. Sometimes it makes me think that college football’s leading trivia master Matt Brown had it right when he called the 2000 Independence Bowl, not altogether unseriously, the peak of civilization. Or maybe it was something less profound than that, a snow bowl as a snow day, a stolen three and a half hours of perfection, and as ephemeral as the snow itself.

The Great Bowl Game Robbery

When people think of garish green jackets, they tend to think of the ones worn by champions of The Masters golf tournament in Augusta, GA. People may not know, however, that the committee members in charge of the Cotton Bowl, the 88-year college football postseason contest in Dallas, Texas wear green jackets too. They wear green jackets like Fiesta Bowl officials wear yellow jackets and Orange Bowl officials wear, well, obviously, making them look like Century 21 agents for college football, selling their own games to teams and conferences. Indeed, if bowl game representatives attending games throughout the year is ostensibly defined as scouting, as the former Fiesta Bowl chairman Bruce Skinner once noted, it is really about sales. That is why bowl games, to quote college football’s great evangelist slash critic Dan Jenkins, are “certainly American,” or more specifically, “museum-quality specimens,” to quote the esteemed Charlie Pierce, “of a kind of lost American ballyhoo.” The goal of bowl games was never really to create the most deserving matchups, only the most appealing, as much about commerce as competition. This became even more acute when the majority of bowls stopped being civic events and exclusively, for all intents and purposes, began functioning as television shows; the jacketed salesmen and saleswomen were thinking of what program would bring the most eyeballs to TV. This is why a pedantic 6-4-1 Notre Dame earned a bid to the 1995 Fiesta Bowl. This is why an 11-1 Kansas State team a breath away from playing for the national championship then got shunted by all the big bowls in 1998; nobody in Manhattan (NY) wanted to watch a team from Manhattan (KS).

The final 4-team college football playoff before it expands to 12 entrants for next season was announced last Sunday. The field included undefeated Michigan and Washington, though undefeated Florida State was eschewed for one-loss Texas and Alabama. From a general perspective, it might seem surprising. After all, FSU was a gridiron powerhouse in the 80s and 90s, and at times in the twenty-tens, last winning a championship in 2014. Even so, this public research university in Tallahassee is a Johnny-come-lately where backroom pigskin politics are concerned, and especially compared to such good ol’ programs like Texas and Alabama. And that is what this playoff committee’s ultimate decision suggests, equating 12-0 Florida State with, say, 12-0 1975 Arizona State, or 12-0 1998 Tulane, good teams, nice teams, sweet teams with sweet stories, but not worthy of sitting at the adult table. Maybe it was a kind of cronyism, or maybe it was that FSU had appeared significantly diminished on offense since losing their starting quarterback to injury, causing nightmares of them being routed in the playoff and viewers changing, ye gods, the channel.

Unlike some of my faux colleagues, I can’t quite see this as one of the black & white scenes from “JFK,” meaning that I can’t quite see it in conspiratorial terms, committee members fielding secret phone calls from ESPN executives about who to put in and who to leave out. (Or maybe that’s just because ex-Nebraska Cornhusker Will Shields was on the committee and my blind loyalty to the team prevents me from casting aspersions on the 1992 Outland Trophy winner.) I tend to think the committee probably was seeking what they perceived rightly or wrongly as the best matchups rather than the right ones, and that just happened to dovetail with the aim of so many glad handing bowl officials of yore. That’s why when ESPN would show shots over the weekend of playoff committee members watching games from lavish individual recliners, I kept imagining them sporting garish (carnation pink?) blazers of their own, pushing through one more sale, insisting that Michigan v Alabama would be so much shinier and exciting than Michigan v Florida State. And I confess, like George Costanza going for the ’89 LeBaron in lieu of the Consumer-tested ’89 Volvo in spite of himself, I happily drove Michigan v Alabama right off the lot.

My Favorite College Football Games: Game 17

December 22, 1984 (Florida Citrus Bowl): Florida State - 17 Georgia - 17

Did you know that until 2002 a college football player’s individual statistics compiled in a postseason bowl game were not considered part of their overall season totals? The still standing single season rushing record of 2,628 yards set by Oklahoma State’s Barry Sanders in 1988 remains as astonishing now as it was then not least because his record is shortchanged the 222 yards he gained in that year’s Holiday Bowl triumph over Wyoming. That’s 222 yards, not to mention 5 touchdowns, that are just sort out there in the ether, as if the 1988 Holiday Bowl took place on the opposite side of the International Date Line and when Sanders crossed back over, all his stats were lost. The official records show Nebraska’s Tommie Frazier gained only 604 yards on the ground in 1995, not 803, because his magnificent 199 in that year’s Fiesta Bowl belong not to him, I guess, but to the Fiesta Bowl Committee and the City of Tempe. Indeed, when bowl games are sometimes cited as being figuratively meaningless, it’s forgotten that for much of their existence they were literally meaningless, their statistics spiritually scrubbed while up until 1965 the sport’s national champions got crowned via polling before the bowls were played. And even when the concluding polls were released after the bowl games, only a few postseason contests generally ever factored into the championship discussion, meaning the others remained unofficially inconsequential, like the 1984 Citrus Bowl, the exemplar of the meaningless bowl game, matching 7-3-1 Florida State against 7-4 Georgia in a game played one day after the mythical National Championship had in effect already been decided. 

 

For its first 35 years, the Florida Citrus Bowl was the Tangerine Bowl. Tangerines, though, are not the only citrus products in the Sunshine State, and in 1983, the Florida Citrus Commission paid $1.25 million to change the game’s name to the Florida Citrus Bowl, becoming the very first bowl named for a corporate sponsor. That evoked its status as a kind of boom bowl, destined in a few years to upgrade its December date to the (then) prestigious New Year’s Day, mirroring its host city Orlando, fueled in the 80s by Walt Disney World which had opened 13 years earlier. After all, long before bowl games became predominantly made-for-TV fodder under the umbrella of ESPN, they were civic events meant to showcase their host cities, a detail some of the more esteemed bowl games have since forgotten. The Fiesta Bowl moved inside to a sterile dome years ago, eschewing the free advertising of showing freezing Midwesterners like me the Valley of the Sun in all its luminous glory, which I thought of during last year’s Citrus Bowl when the long shadows cast by the warm sun in the second half became juxtaposed against the snow falling right outside my window. Used to be that you didn’t just watch a bowl game to watch the game but to point at the TV screen and at Orlando, at Tempe, at Pasadena, and think “I want to go to there.” 

Your game cannot rise to the hallowed level of CFB postseason criterion on context alone, however, and the 1984 Florida Citrus Bowl is a paragon of its kind because it is more daffy than dramatic, more spirited than scintillating, the partially prosaic, technically inconclusive score both saying it all and not beginning to say it. The game opens on a festively inauspicious note with Florida State smartly driving right down the field and then fumbling the ball away, foreshadowing a game that regardless of Georgia staking a 14-0 lead at halftime is rife with emotional turnabouts. Georgia losing its starting quarterback to injury proves less a cause of concern than bringer of great joy, in the form of freshman backup signal caller James Jackson, a dual threat quarterback in the antiquated era when that term was considered avant-garde, taking the galley proof of notoriously conservative coach Vince Dooley and making some substantial edits with his big scrambles and deep bombs that earn him the game’s MVP award. Florida State’s offensive identity, on the other hand, is a kind of fun-loving lack of one, looking toward the colorful future by throwing the ball around to its speedy wide receivers and running a smattering of trick plays even as it reverts to monochrome in running the triple option. 

Florida State’s special teams, meanwhile, are daredevils, all, trying so relentlessly to block kicks that twice they are penalized for roughing the kicker. This causes no small amount of bellyaching on the part of NBC color analyst Bob Trumpy, imploring Florida State to take it down a notch, until, hey, wouldn’t you know, trailing 17-9 in the fourth quarter, their special teams crash through, block a punt, and return it to the end zone for a touchdown. Third time’s the charm! They convert the two-point conversion off a nifty reverse to knot the score, leading to a final few minutes that despite the teams trying to break the tie, is not so much suspenseful as just kind of exuberantly frantic, epitomized in a crowd that never sounds cacophonous, just in high spirits, having a good time, and underlined in how even as Criqui calls the action, he is also saying thanks to the broadcast crew and various bowl game officials, as if this is all the conclusion to a big show. (One fun added ingredient is NBC frequently transitioning to commercial breaks with dollops of Bruce Springsteen’s “Bobby Jean” because it’s 1984 and “Born in the USA” is just about the biggest thing going. If that song seems like a curious choice for such a milieu, I don’t know, I think there’s something a little Auld Lang Syne-ish in Bruce’s breakup anthem for his BFF bandmate Little Stevie.) 

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There is this sensation I remember from Christmases of my youth, one I innately felt back then but didn’t intellectually understand and could not have intelligently described, where the whole world as I knew it suddenly came to a pleasing halt, no homework, no basketball practice, no plans. I didn’t understand what being on the clock meant because I had yet to ever officially clock in, but that, I realize now, is how it felt, off the clock, not timeless but without time, an exultant lull in the never-ending forward momentum of the world. And because bowl games have always been inextricable from the holidays ever since the very first one, the Tournament East-West football game, was staged specifically to coincide with the Rose Parade in Pasadena on New Year’s Day, for me, they always went hand-in-hand with that interregnal, out-of-time feeling. Of course, that’s simply because as a kid the whole world only extends from the front yard to the backyard with your own home in-between, a feeling that fades as you get older and you realize that despite a few days off around the holidays, time doesn’t really stop but just plods on. “Happy Holidays,” as Paul Krugman put it just the other day for The New York Times, “now get back to work.” 

 

I can’t help but think that for me, bowl games are the last vestige of that respite, where rather than infused with stakes and stress, the majority of them mean nothing, reaching the true sports ideal that is often unthinkingly cited but never truly lived: just for fun. But even that is being compromised now, with players opting out of them as business decisions, protecting their future earning potential as professionals. And I understand it, I agree with it, I applaud them for it, and still, I want to say, your whole life is about to become a business decision, a series of transactions, of tasks, of stuff to do, and this is your last chance not to make it count, per se, but to do something that does not count, to live your life off the clock, in this last little space across that metaphorical international date line and out of arm’s reach of the dreaded big picture.

The 1984 Florida Citrus Bowl concludes with Georgia illustrating what should always be a team’s (un)official bowl season credo – Why Not?! – by sending on Kevin Butler to attempt a game-winning 71-yard field goal. True, Butler was a 1984 first team All American and connected on a 60-yard field goal earlier that season, but 71 yards would have been the longest in the history of organized football; it would still be the longest field goal in the history of organized football. (This, it should be noted, was still the era when college kickers were allowed to use tees for field goals.) The notion of him making it seems so remote, almost comical, that Criqui cracks that he will “do a double gainer right outta the (press) box” if Butler succeeds in sending the ball over the crossbar. Butler does not succeed, naturally, because if he had you’d know about it, and you’d probably know about Criqui doing a double gainer out of the Citrus Bowl press box too. But he comes close. This field goal, it is dead center and though camera angles back then are not what they are now, really looks as if it would have been good from 70. It is the most mind-blowing failed field goal I have ever seen.

It’s not necessarily more apropos that Butler missed. I like thinking of the longest field goal in organized football history occurring in the strange postseason firmament unique to college football, in the record book but also out there in the wild gridiron yonder. But in coming up a breath short of history, that kick proves a captivating moment in time, if ultimately insignificant, which is nothing if not an apt metaphor for the whole reason bowl games exist in the first place. 

Pitch Meeting: Third Saturday in October

The University of Tennessee Volunteers defeated the University of Alabama Crimson Tide over the weekend (stay with me - eh, if you want) in a 52-49 game epitomizing why college football will forever be the sport closest to this blog’s heart. It was a crucible of plot twists and pressure under the lights of a 102,000-seat stadium yielding as much electrifying brilliance as eye-covering folly that opened incredible cosmic portals to the sport’s history (we were on the precipice of The Fifth Down sequel for a minute there), demonstrated crucial shades of dimension (to my mind, the best player on the field was, in fact, the losing quarterback) and concluded not simply with a last-second field goal (that went over the crossbar as a kind of pigskin knuckleball demonstrating how even then the college football gods saw fit to throw in one more twist) but with the field overrun by bewildered, jubilant, orange-covered humanity and goalposts uprooted from the end zone and paraded through the streets of Knoxville, living out the sport’s perfect nexus between exultation and insanity. And that insanity, that’s what I’m thinking about. Because college football movies, whether the plethora of them released in the 30s and 40s when the game was king in America alongside baseball, or the more recent ones, tend to channel that insanity through the comedy genre, a la “Horse Feathers” (1932) or “Necessary Roughness” (1991) or some sort of gritty drama, a la “Saturday’s Heroes” (1937) or “The Program” (1993) (there is also the reverential fluff of “Rudy,” but don’t get me started). Rarely, though, if ever, do you see the college football thriller. And that is where Cinema Romantico comes in.

Tennessee’s game with Alabama is a rivalry even if it had been some time since Tennessee had prevailed, bearing its own nickname – The Third Saturday in October, simple-sounding, perhaps, but evocative of how, in their own minds, the date is reserved just for them. But I have always envisioned that moniker as something more, the title of my college football thriller, one I have heard for years and years in the voice of Don LaFontaine as an aerial shot of Neyland Stadium unfolds on the screen. “On the Third Saturday in October, tensions always run high. But this year, they are about to explode.”

An Alabama man, Henry Mize (Michael Shannon), with a personal history tied to the Crimson Tide football team gradually doled out over an hour and forty-five minutes, pilots a boat loaded with a bomb from a dock in Huntsville, Alabama and up the Tennessee River toward Knoxville, lowering his Crimson Tide flag at the border and raising a Volunteer one, a la “Captain Blood.” The plan: he will dock with the famed Vol Navy – an armada of tailgating boats moored on the banks of Neyland Stadium – where in a pre-planned ceremony the football team’s bluetick coonhound mascot Smokey will be brought aboard the boat of the informal Admiral (Luke Wilson) of the ostensible navy and blow them all to kingdom come. 

Henry’s preparations and voyage are crosscut with newbie UT Daily Beacon reporter Kelsey Slocum (Ayo Edebiri) who discovers in would-be puff piece about Smokey that the dog has received a death threat. When the local police laugh the threat off as just some jokester blowing smoke and her editor advises it is fake news (“Really? That’s really your response? You’re being serious right now?”) she skips her latest deadline, class, and huge exam to travel to the Yellowhammer State and open a time-sensitive investigation, taking her into the sordid heart of college football, from Paul Finebaum-ish radio personality John Theodore “J.T.” Pope (Bruce McGill), the self-proclaimed supreme pontiff of SEC Football, who becomes Kelsey’s unlikely co-detective, to an unctuous booster (Michael Rooker) who Knows More Than He Is Saying, to Henry’s ex-wife (Amber Benson), to some entity called the Huntsville Touchdown Club that proves to be less a non-profit for children’s medical needs than the front for a militant football fan organization, and finally, to a shady boat and RV salesman Grady Smith (Walton Goggins) who unlocks the mystery. (“You’re a Volunteer,” I imagine Goggins saying in his resplendent native Alabamian accent. “Why don’t you volunteer to show yourself to the door.”)

Kelsey and Pope then make haste upriver, aided by an idealistic river cop (Emily Procter) who in an emotional conclusion to their longstanding argument over whether Nick Saban is the superior coach to Bear Bryant (she says yes), commandeers the vessel by pushing her superior (Dwight Yoakam) overboard, outfoxing the inside man (Johnny Knoxville) operating a lock and dam, and racing to prevent the Third Saturday in October from being a day that lives in infamy. 

Pitch Meeting: Potential Superficial College Football Player Biopics

Non-college football fans might be unaware of the sport’s earth-shaking news this past summer (stay with me!) when it was announced that after 70-some years of devising the noble-sounding term student-athlete to keep those athletes strictly under their thumb, the NCAA will finally allow athletes to be compensated for their name, image, and likeness. Many have rushed to take advantage. Iowa Basketball’s Jordan Bohannon signed up for Boomin Iowa fireworks; Nebraska Volleyball’s Lexi Sun unveiled her own apparel line; Arkansas Football’s Trey Knox partnered with PetSmart for a paid endorsement featuring not only himself but his pet husky, Blue. As gratifying as it is to see, say, Miami’s D’Eriq King and Bubba Bolden garnering deals with something called College Hunks Hauling Junk (which makes me imagine an alternate world in which the legendary 1986 Miami football team could have been sponsored by a Dade County waste transfer center, or something), I can’t help but feel these athletes are still missing an opportunity. I’m talking, of course, about movies.

Back in the pre-student athlete days, when college football was arguably the king sport of the U.S.A., star players occasionally played themselves in ostensible biopics. Tom Harmon starred in “Harmon of Michigan”; Army’s famed running back duo Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard starred in “The Spirit of West Point”; Frankie Albert, who did not even win the Heisman Trophy like the preceding trio, starred in “The Spirit of Stanford.” By the 1950s, this practice had stopped and I, for one, think it’s high time to bring it back. Cement your Name, Image, and Likeness as flickering myth, young men. Here are a few suggestions to get us started:

Spencer Rattler. The preseason ESPN first team All American quarterback from Oklahoma signed an NIL deal with Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, a Baton Rouge-founded fast-food restaurant. So, we will cast Rattler in “Rattle & Hum” (note the ampersand) in which Rattler plays himself as quarterback trying to win a national championship on Saturdays while working the counter at Raising Cane’s on Fridays and Sundays, leading to all sorts of comic mishaps, trying to watch game tape on break and devising a variation on the ol’ reverse flea flicker he aptly deems The Chicken Finger.

Sam Howell. As, perhaps, Rattler’s primary competition for best QB in the country, the swashbuckling Howell will star in “The Spirit of Sam” with gregarious Tar Heel coach Mack Brown playing himself as a kind of Lloyd Bridges-in-“Hot Shots!” buffoon, pigskin propaganda suggesting that if you come to UNC, you can do whatever you want!

Ahmad “Sauce” Gardner. I mean, a defensive back nicknamed Sauce is just crying out for his own movie. Unfortunately, the genesis of Gardner’s moniker, which he explained to Logan Lusk at the University of Cincinnati’s News Record, bestowed upon him by his Little League coach when he was six, simply won’t do for our cornball Gardner advocacy. So, let’s pretend that his first day on campus, Gardner ingests some Skyline Chili Hot Sauce for the first time, rendering him with gridiron superpowers, which he strengthens with another bowl of chili before each additional game. But when the team’s rival manages to rid the entire Queen City of Skyline Chili Hot Sauce before The Big Game, how far will Gardner go to acquire his necessary spicy potion?

Matt Corral. One of the most famous college football games of the last decade, if not longer, is known, simply, as The Katy Perry Game. That’s because the pop superstar appeared on ESPN’s pre-game show, College GameDay, ahead of the Ole Miss v Alabama showdown and not only proceeded to be the only one to pick Ole Miss to spring the upset but openly flirted with Oklahoma QB Trevor Knight across the airwaves and threw corndogs in the air. Later that night, after Ole Miss proved her audacious prediction correct, Perry was seen diving off a bar somewhere in Oxford. It only makes sense, then, that Corral, the current Ole Miss quarterback, and who’s got a little rock star air himself, would fall in love with the fictional pop superstar, Shanna Grace (Vanessa Hudgens), when she appears at College GameDay ahead of The Big Game, creating a campus stir as the quarterback juggles football, fame, and romance. 

Jayden Daniels. Have you heard tell of the controversy down in Tempe? Some Arizona State backers have grown disenchanted with the ostensible sinfulness of the school’s Sun Devil nickname, petitioning for a change to Sun Angels instead. So, in “Joltin’ Jayden”, as Daniels tries to lead ASU to a championship, he will be visited throughout the movie by a Sun Devil (Kevin Corrigan) on one shoulder and a Sun Angel (Gabrielle Union) on the other. Eventually, the Venezia Pizza created in Daniels’s honor (pepperoni, sausage, bacon, mushrooms and extra cheese) proves that food is as uniting as an undefeated record, bringing everyone together as Phoenix’s public research university decides to rechristen itself as the Arizona State Extra Cheese. 

Pitch Meeting: Football Monastery

In a recent piece for the Omaha World-Herald, Dirk Chatelain did a deep dive on the grand college bowl game drama (stay with me!) that played out across New Year’s Day 1971, culminating in a mythical national championship for my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers. The story is heavy on anecdotes and joyful specifics, none more than the one Chatelain pulled from the Rose Bowl between Stanford and Ohio State, the latter coached by the legendarily disagreeable Woody Hayes. Chatelain sets the unlikely southern California scene: “Hayes could’ve cut his team some holiday slack. He did not. The old tyrant lodged the team at a California monastery.” STOP THE TAPE. During the 2017 Rose Bowl, the Oklahoma Sooners stayed at the JW Marriott Los Angeles L.A. Live; the Georgia Bulldogs bunked down at the InterContinental Los Angele Downtown. The former claims to set “a new standard for luxury”; the latter “revel(s) in glamour and exhilaration that defines what it means to live the InterContinental life.” Hayes, to reiterate, lodged his team at a freaking monastery. And while it gave me a chuckle, it also gave me an idea. After all, I am a less than successful Hollywood producer, having brought you the likes of “The Sun Bowl Follies” and “Downtown Athletic Club — The Movie”, each one a quasi-uproarious college football comedy. No movie production company is more dedicated to quasi-uproarious college football comedies than mine. And here was another plot for one staring me straight in the face.

Chatelain’s teaser sent me Googling for more backstory. It did not take long to find a 2009 L.A. Times piece by longtime college football scribe Chris Dufresne (who sadly died last year) detailing Woody Hayes’s dedication to No Fun. “The Mater Dolorosa Passionist Retreat Center, still operational, was established in 1924 on 83 acres in the foothills in Sierra Madre. The monastery, built in the 1930s, was torn down after the 1991 earthquake. The property was taken over by the Army in World War II and used as a weapons staging area and a place to quarter wounded soldiers.” Dufresne continued: “Hayes could not have found a better place for solitude -- never mind that the monastery scared the wits out of many of his players.”

Dufresne quotes a guard on Ohio State’s 1968 team, Phil Strickland, recounting the team flight to the 1969 Rose Bowl: “(Hayes) had the trainers tape everyone up on the plane. That meant we were going to go directly to the practice field.” And that is where we will begin our tale — “Football Monastery” (a play, you see, on the old expression Football Factory) — with a Hayes surrogate, Joe Melch (J.K. Simmons), coach of Hart Crane College, going up and down the aisle making sure his players are being taped up, banning the flight attendants from food and beverage service and literally throwing the The Columbus Dispatch reporter (Abbi Jacobson) off the plane in a nod to “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.”  Upon landing, the team will go straight to the practice field for a brief and brutal scene before being bussed to the remote monastery, passing Knot’s Berry Farm along the way, the bright lights and towering roller coasters calling to them like a forbidden beacon. 

The rest of the movie, save for an ending we will get to, takes place inside the monastery. The real-life Strickland deemed his team’s experience as being akin to a Lon Chaney movie, star of silent horror movies, a genre which we will merge with both philosophical drama and John Sturges’s “The Great Escape” (1963) into Cinema Romantico Productions’ patented blend of quasi-uproarious comedy as the mad and controlling Joe Melch runs amok before facing up to his feelings and fears while in monk-like isolation (helped by chats with an eccentric monk, played by Kevin Corrigan, over Trappist ale in the grotto) and the players scrupulously plan a breakout attempt. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, when they are all supposed to be in bed early for the next day’s big game, the team flees as Joe Melch wakes bright and early the following morning to discover the monastery only contains monks. Ten minutes before the Rose Bowl, Melch finally finds his team at Knot Berry Farm. 

The movie cuts to the Rose Bowl where the head referee looks at an empty sideline and then at his watch in confusion. 

The movie cuts back to Knot Berry’s Farm where Coach Melch rides the Xcelerator, hands in the air, with his whole team. End Credits. 

5 College Football Movies That Need To Be Made

And so another college football season has come to pass. As you may know that Cinema Romantico’s #1 favorite sport is college football, if only because occasionally Cinema Romantico enjoys force-feeding college football references which quite likely leave those who have no interest in college football or those who live in countries without college football (that is, every country that is not America) scratching their heads or rolling their eyes or both. So, I apologize – profusely – this is a list that required concocting, a list detailing five films about college football that should be made.

In the modern era, movies are light on decent college football opuses. (“College Coach” of 1933 and the Golden Age is my personal favorite.) Oh, some will point you toward “Rudy” and I will then point you toward Charles Pierce unforgettably calling it “a passel of unreconstructed mythopoeic bullpucky even by the standards of the university in question, which are considerable.” And when I Googled “College Football Movies”, like any strong-minded cinematic scholar of a certain genre might, I immediately came upon a Top 10 list at Bleacher Report (not linking cuz, like, really) which in keeping with its reputation as a bastion of well-researched, seriously-considered, liltingly-written prose kicked off its list with the following: “The Waterboy is definitely one of Adam Sandler's worst movies, but this movie still has its moments. And it is about college football.” Oh. Well. Sure. I mean, as long as it has its moments. (This list was composed by a “senior analyst.” God help us all.)

This, people, is what I’m talking about. I couldn’t even read the rest of the list. If it needs to include “The Waterboy”, even if it’s all the way down there at #10, we as a movie-producing, college football-obsessing nation have precipitously failed. And to me, this is unacceptable, and which is why I am here today in my official capacity as irrational college football devotee and movie loving whack job to propose five college football-centric films that should be made immediately.

5 College Football Movies That Need To Be Made

Disciples of St. Darrell. In 1963, Dan Jenkins of Sports Illustrated, whose phenomenal writing on the greatest sport continues to endure, traveled with a quartet of high-livin’ Texans as they attended four football games – three college, including the vaunted Red River Rivalry (Texas vs. Oklahoma), and one professional – over the course of 72 hours, eating, drinking, bulls****ing, and being oh so Texas-y. Describing it would take as long as it takes to actually read the article. So just read the article, and then be prepared to ask aloud, “Why isn’t that a movie?”

Plainfield Teacher’s College. Amongst the greatest sports hoaxes, I first came across this in one of those Incredibly True Sports Stories, or some such, books in my grade school library, though it was also recounted on an episode of Slate’s Hang Up and Listen sports podcast. In 1941, a Wall Street Stockbroker with the laudatory name of Morris Newburger invented a mythical football team known as Plainfield Teacher’s College. These were throwback days when newspapers printed scores of games called into them, so Newburger simply phoned in non-existent scores of non-existent games under an alias and presto! A make-believe juggernaut was conjured. I’m picturing a Charlie Kaufman-ish vibe, a film swinging riotously between reality and fantasy, the fictitious accounts mutating into something tangible, real life people becoming consumed by the fanciful ones, a crazified account of how the game is rooted in sentimentalized fantasy as much as reality. (One important note: Newburger also manufactured a star player named John Chung who – oh boy – gained power by eating rice on the sideline between quarters. Ah, America. We might have to eliminate that tidbit for the filmed version.)

1942 Rose Bowl. One of the go-to trivia questions for any CFB nut is this: what was the one Rose Bowl not contested in Pasadena, California? Answer: 1942, which was moved from the west coast in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor all the way across the country to Durham, North Carolina and Duke University where it was played in the rain. Last year Sports Illustrated had a fabulous recounting of the entire ordeal, the cross-country journey Oregon State would make and their Japanese-American teammate forced to stay behind, and opposing players that would later meet on the battlefield. There is a whole movie, I think, in chronicling this entire story, one that both gave a concerned nation something to focus on and simultaneously proved how much sports can mean and how little sports can mean in the grand scheme.

The Toilet Bowl. In 1983 Oregon and Oregon State played the last collegiate football game to conclude in a 0-0 tie (overtime has been added to prevent such a result, but it took 14 years) in the ancient sport’s most singular debacle, a game so infamously god-awful that colloquially it has come to be known as the Toilet Bowl. The glory of its misery is truly mind-boggling. The teams combined for eleven fumbles, five interceptions and four missed field goals and was contested in, as sportswriter Austin Murphy wondrously phrased it, “Old Testament rains.” This, along with another idea I have long pondered, is my dreamiest of dream movies, one that in its ballad of comical ineptness would still impress upon us the game’s absurd romanticism and how even in the worst of times and the foulest of conditions, the glory of sport and the human desire to succeed can shine through gray, gloomy clouds above soggy 1980’s Oregon astroturf.

The Vol Navy. The one original pitch on this list. The Vol Navy is a fleet of high-falutin’ Tennessee Volunteers fans in expensive yachts who tailgate on the Tennessee River, flowing alongside the banks where mammoth Neyland Stadium rests. And while offering this idea might give someone a bad idea, well, what about a comical thriller in which a crazed Alabama fan goes rogue on the Third Saturday In October, masquerades as a Tennessee fan, acquires a luxurious boat, infiltrates the Vol Navy, and attempts to……well, you see where this is going. Also, if you know SEC football, you know this idea isn’t as absurd as it sounds. Even if it was all made up it might be more fact based than “The Express.”