Musings from Arledge: The most wonderful time of the year

Most people think Andy Williams was singing about Christmas when he wrote, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” Nonsense. He was talking about the start of football season.

Here in Dallas, it’s over 100 almost every day right now. But it’s starting to feel like fall, because football is only weeks away. Soon, we’ll have hundreds of high school games going on throughout this state, at least half of which will have bigger crowds than UCLA’s home opener. It’s football season. High school football, NFL, and of course, the best of all, college football season. 

College football season is the best time of the year, of course, but it can still get pretty dark. I don’t mean shorter days or the end of Daylight Savings Time. I mean it can get downright grim. If you’ve been a USC fan from 2009 to the present, you know what I’m talking about. 

But the start of football season? Glorious. It’s the most optimistic time of the year. It’s so optimistic that even UCLA football fans are excited. They think that Nico’s transfer had nothing to do with money, that DeShaun Foster is actually a pretty underrated public speaker, and that those powder-blue uniforms are manly in the right lighting and with the right accessories. You know, maybe something like this:

And the Bruins even think UCLA will win a major bowl game this year. 

Well, most of them do. I know because I ran into all six remaining UCLA football fans last week. They meet monthly at a Domino’s in Reseda where their leader is Assistant Manager. Five of the six are very excited. The other dude complains about everything.

But that’s how fan bases are. Some are always optimistic, often ridiculously so. We had people on the WeAreSC board who were still cheering on Clay Helton at the very end of his tenure as the broken-down hull of the USS Trojan Football was coming to rest right alongside the Titanic. That was a bit much. And there were USC fans who were ripping into Pete Carroll because he lost a single game on the road to a ranked team in 2008. I want coaches who always go undefeated! No exceptions! Also a bit much.

But most of the rest of us are somewhere in the middle. We move back and forth depending on how the season is going and what our recent history has been. But August is when we are most optimistic. Hey, I heard from Marc Kulkin that John Doe is way bigger this year! My donor buddy says John Doe has been hitting the playbook hard this offseason! Random neighbor thinks the game should slow down for John Doe this year!

Things didn’t go as planned last year, but this year will be different! 

Will it? Who knows—but that’s not the point. I’m not trying to talk you out of preseason optimism. To the contrary. We need optimism in our lives. 

Imagine for a second being an Oregon football fan. It’s hard, I know. Take eight reposado shots in rapid succession to dull your intellect and it might be easier. I’ll wait. Ready? So most Oregon football fans are descendants of people who arrived in that state on the Oregon trail in the 1800’s. (I think. I don’t actually have a cite for that claim.) That was a brutal trip, as you probably remember from the game in elementary school. Nature was screaming at these people the entire way that people should not live in Oregon and they should all turn around immediately. So the travelers would get a few drownings, some scalpings, sprinkle in a little starvation, maybe a few wagon accidents. All of it designed to send a single message: no! It’s wet and gross and the girls won’t shave. But the people who eventually settled in Oregon were the ones who were too stubborn, too dumb, to listen. 

They settled the Willamette Valley and got their first taste of a glorious Oregon summer—high of 62, overcast, drizzly—and thought they had found heaven. And then, a few years later, somebody discovers football. Teddy Roosevelt thinks people should play. Somebody brings a ball from the east coast. And the Oregonians put together a team. And for what seemed like hundreds or even thousands of years, right up until about eight minutes ago, the Oregonians were smashed ruthlessly almost every week. 

Could you imagine going through that year after year without at least a little taste of the sweet nectar we call preseason optimism? Preseason optimism is what life gives you when you have nothing else. It’s the condemned prisoner’s hope that the governor is going to call any minute. It’s the high school nerd’s hope that the head cheerleader was actually smiling at him and not the star quarterback sitting behind him. It’s Charlie Brown believing that this time Lucy really will let him kick the football.

Preseason optimism is good. It’s necessary. Don’t fight it; roll with it.   

It’s preseason optimism that allows every single fan base to believe the pollsters are biased against their team. And they’re right! The pollsters are biased. Some are biased because of their own allegiance or their geography. Many are biased by ignorance. How can they possibly have any idea how good the top 50 college football teams will be this year? Lincoln Freakin’ Riley doesn’t really know how good his own team will be this year, and he has a ton more information than any media guy or assistant sports information director casting a vote in the coaches’ poll. The truth is, nobody knows. You only play twelve regular season games, and the difference between being in the top five and just missing out on the playoff could be only two plays over the course of the year. Nobody can predict that. Quantum physics is less complicated. 

So go with the flow. Let everybody else’s excitement take you somewhere that you know you shouldn’t logically go. Is USC going to win twelve regular season games? Yes! Of course! Or maybe not. I don’t know. But what’s the point of being depressed about a season before you have to be? The college football gods have a way of kicking us all in the face eventually. Wouldn’t you rather live in a state of naïve bliss until it happens?

Besides, why should we take all of this so seriously anyway? Think about it. We’re all watching anxiously as 17-year-old kids with no life experience and no discernible skills get six-figure checks because we think there’s a chance that 17-year-old kid might be able to knock down another 17-year-old kid on some Saturday afternoon three years from now. I’m not saying we shouldn’t care—Let’s care! It’s fun!—but I am saying if this is the hobby we’re going to spend time on, we should at least recognize that it’s a little bit silly and treat our obsession accordingly.

I mean arguably the very best college football program of all time—down in the south where IT JUST MEANS MORE!—is supported by tens of thousands of overweight, overalls-clad dudes who look like Deliverance extras that cause a Covid-like run on toilet paper in the State of Alabama every year so they can stick toilet paper and laundry detergent on their heads in public. And all of the people around them think this is clever! 

If that’s our hobby, people, let’s remember that we don’t have to take it all that seriously. The least we can do is indulge in some unwarranted preseason optimism. I don’t want our aerospace engineers to engage in unwarranted optimism. I want my plane to land safely. But the people with toilet paper on their heads and the other fans who live and die with what some kids do on a grass field on Saturdays? Sure. Why not? What’s the harm?

Just think about how silly the things are that we focus on. Some guy in Eugene braves the chill of an Oregon summer to rip off his shirt and cannonball into a pool with some underage kid in his underwear without his parents knowing and we all want to talk about it … actually, bad example. Maybe we should be talking about that. Maybe the authorities should be. Forget it. 

Shush! No snickering from you, Nittany Lions. Thousands of you are still lighting candles every Saturday morning in your home shrines to the State of Pennsylvania’s Enabler in Chief. You don’t have any room to talk about this, or much of anything else if we’re being honest. Behave for the next 150 years and maybe we’ll listen to what you have to say.

See? I told you college football can get pretty dark. Let’s get this thing back on track. 

To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, preseason optimism is good. And it can look different for everybody. Vandy fans sell their souls to Satan every year to have a season like last year’s, which means having a record that would get an Ohio State coach fired. And that’s okay. We’re all starting from different places, and therefore our preseason visions of glory will all look different.

And sometimes the optimism becomes reality; sometimes things really do get better. After spending years just hoping they could be as good as San Jose State, Oregon now wins a lot of football games. And they have therefore earned the right to replace their old optimism with a higher level of absurd optimism. Now they talk about how they will soon be joining the big guys at the Blue Blood Table. 

Now this is silly talk, of course, as college football optimism so often is. 

Oregon is like my college head coach’s son. Because of who his dad was, he had access to the locker room, to the lunch room, everything. He would run around and we’d give him a high five and maybe throw him the football. Because he was young, he probably thought he was one of us, much the way Oregon thinks it’s one of the blue bloods just because its Uncle Phil can pay for it to run around freely in the same building—a privilege not allowed in Uncle Phil’s Asian factories. Can somebody chain that boy to his machine!? He only made 497 shoes in his last 16-hour shift! I’m not interested in his injuries! I’m interested in his production!   

In reality, the Ducks aren’t yet close to having a seat at the Blue Blood Table. Imagine if USC, Notre Dame, Alabama, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Michigan and maybe a couple of others are sitting at the big table in the lunch room. And imagine that all of them carry their major trophies around with them everywhere they go, so the table is completely full of national title trophies and Heismans. There are so many trophies on that table that it’s hard to find even a little space for a lunch tray.

Now imagine that little Oregon runs up and asks to sit at the table. He has no trouble carrying his trophies; he doesn’t even need a box. He still has a free hand for a hacky sack and a 38-dollar coffee. The blue bloods point out that the table is already full—in fact, it’s hard to even find a place to set down a burger and a coke with all of the trophies taking up so much space. We don’t have room for anybody else. To which Oregon replies, “That’s okay, there’s a few inches on this corner for my one Heisman. I’ll go pull up a stool.” 

You can see the problem, can’t you? Remember on Sesame Street when they would sing
“Which of these things is not like the other?” Yeah, this would be a pretty easy episode of that game. Even the slowest kids—the ones who will likely attend the University of Oregon someday—are going to get this one right.

But the Ducks have optimism! And I don’t want to take that away from them. Leave that to Ohio State.

So, Tide fans, go ahead and believe that wearing toilet paper on your head is cool. Notre Dame fans, go ahead and believe the girls on campus are pretty. Oklahoma fans, go ahead and believe that with Lincoln Riley gone the Sooners will go on a new Bud Wilkinson-type run. Michigan fans, go ahead and believe that your offense will incorporate the forward pass this year. Bruin fans, go ahead and believe that somebody, anybody, cares about your team. SEC fans, go ahead and believe that a schedule featuring eight home games, four division-two programs, and four road trips that are all within a two-hour drive is really so difficult that you should get a playoff berth if you go 8-4.  

And, my Trojan fans, let’s lean into that optimism ourselves. Go for it! Yes, the DJ is awesome! Yes, Pat Haden’s renovation plans really were great! Yes, the fans in the expensive seats really will show up to a home game and won’t scream at the people in front of them to sit down. Yes, Jayden Maiava will play like Jalen Hurts this year. Yes, the O line will steamroll the Irish and the Ducks and everybody else. Yes, the next episode of Inside the Trojans Huddle might be entertaining! 

Believe all of this and much, much more. As Adam Duritz told Mr. Jones, I wanna be someone to believe. And rightfully so; it’s fun to believe.  And who knows, it might just happen. Because it’s August, and everything is possible in August.