College Football Playoffs and Other Strange Developments

I'm not quite sure how it happened. Whenever football has been discussed in my lifetime, the conversation has taken on the sound of an adult in a Charlie Brown cartoon. And yet here we are, fresh into 2025, at the height of the college football playoffs, and I am INTO IT.

Dale had me fill out brackets like it was March Madness. We've been perfecting tailgate type recipes for yesterday, and - I swear I'm not making this up - the other day talking to my brother, I rattled off eleven of the twelve teams in the playoffs like I was reciting my grocery list. I forgot Indiana. Dale looked at me in wonder, like maybe he'd fallen in love with me all over again. I must confess, I felt like Ken Jennings for a minute.

Those who have known me since childhood would say, "Your dad was a coach - how could you not be interested in sports?"

But somehow the sports talk never crossed the gender barrier when I was growing up, and I'm not sure if I wasn't allowed in the clubhouse, or it was simply assumed I shared my mother's disinterest. I followed the cue cards dealt me and went shopping with her on long Saturday afternoons with sports on TV.

When Dale and I became engaged, I was delighted to not be marrying someone quite as crazed about sports as my dad and brothers. Little did I know we had dated on the off season. Fine by me. I started to quilt, and over the years assembled a killer sewing room to rival Dale's killer woodshop in the basement. There we happily coexisted, two floors apart from each other, to come together in the middle for equal doses of Bourne or Jane Austen marathons when we were in the mood for a movie.

Then that Thing happened three years ago, where I tried to die, God said "NOT NOW," and then I tried not to die. The whole thing took the better part of 4 months, and during that time, the sun pretty much came up every morning when Dale walked into my hospital room. He was so instrumental in bringing me back to life, I had a happier version of Stockholm syndrome when I finally got to go home on February 23, 2022. I just wanted to hang with Dale, and that's pretty much all I had the strength to do.

Thus began my first taste of March Madness, and the team colors determined which teams I cheered for. I genuinely enjoyed the playoffs, but I assumed this was an outlier as far as my interest in sports was concerned. My dad WAS a basketball coach, after all, and one of my brothers played basketball in high school. THAT sport made sense to me. Football? Not so much.

I'd gone to football games in high school and college, and I understood the basic premise of advancing down the field in increments of 4 downs per possession, punting, touchdowns versus field goals if you were out of downs and within kicking range, etc. But as far as I could tell, there were clots of men pushing each other, lunging at each other, flinging each other to the ground, and falling down on top of each other. My succinct explanation of football back then would have been: they throw the ball; then they all fall down. Yet suddenly, the referees were throwing little flags, apparently indicating that someone had fallen down WRONG. It was quite a mystery.

I stopped wanting to go to football games with Dale - an ardent BYU fan - because his fervor shut me down the entire day. I was shushed all the way down to the game, throughout the game, and after the game on the way home, because Dale needed all his attention for:

• The Pre Pre-Game Show

• The Pre-Game Show

• The Post Pre-Game Show

• The Kick-off Show

• The Show (listening to the very game we were watching LIVE in front of us)

• The Pre Post-Game Show

• The Post-Game Show

• The Post Post-Game Show

• The Coaches' Show

• The Scoreboard Show

• The Call-In Show

• The WRAP UP Show

And if the traffic cooperated, we got home in time to RE-WATCH the very game we had just spent the entire day attending.

I couldn't talk? All day? ME? Besides, I had a life. I had hopes, dreams, laundry. There simply wasn't room for a football obsession like this.

Fast forward to Fall 2022: as life had a glimmer of normal after nearly a year of illness and recovery, I had major surgery to finally hook all my insides back up. Weeks of recovery and convalescence again... during college football. There I was again, with energy only to hang with Dale, who had finely honed a system of woodworking during halftimes.

Now, thanks to computer-generated lines, many more things in football made sense to me. And thanks to the continued Stockholm Syndrome, I loved it when Dale patiently explained many of the finer points of those flags, more than once if necessary. I still didn't understand all the positions, and I caught myself when I asked him what that player's "calling" was.

Last year was even better. By then, I had some preferences of my own, not relying only on Dale's favorite - or nemesis - teams. And now this year, I know to look for Matthew McConaughey at the Texas games and the Gaines at Baylor games. I actually got the joke when Ellen Skrmetti - a favorite on Instagram and an Ole Miss fan - said she could live with Texas coming into the SEC because at least they had a Manning.

I've got a long way to go - right now I'm far too random or quixotic in my fandom: - I tend to cheer for:

• Any non-California school

• Any Christian school

• Any underdog

• Any team whose team colors catch my eye, most particularly Carolina blue

• Any team with a jaunty checkerboard endzone (Go Volunteers!)

• Any team with a quarterback who looks like I wish he was my grandson and has a fun name (Stetson Bennett III).

Hey. If Dale can still cheer against Ohio state because of his strong dislike of a FORMER coach, I can still cheer for Georgia because I think the FORMER quarterback has adorable dimples.

The past two days have been a great ride with my football captor. Our newest tailgate recipe, sausage balls, was a huge hit. Thanks to 25 days on a ventilator, I thought I had lost the pitch my screams hit when Texas scored twice so quickly - and then again when they won in double overtime. The next couple of weeks are going to be a lot of fun, because now I'm INTO it, not simply indulging it.

For all this, I've still gotta say - I don't know how you fall down wrong.