Probably the thing most foreign to me since moving to Columbus has been the Ohio State football phenomenon. I've been living in "major league" cities since I was 9 years old (Atlanta, St. Louis, and Kansas City), where professional sports teams, no matter how pathetic (Kansas City Royals, I'm looking squarely in your direction), garner the majority of the attention over college and high school athletics. Columbus, on the other hand, sports only a professional hockey team and a minor league baseball team, and both of them are mere afterthoughts during Buckeye football season. The town typifies all that is wrong and right about college football.

If you've followed this space before, you know that I'm not what you'd call a fan of college football. Slimy boosters, crusty old white-bread coaches, a favoritist ranking system, and a typical schedule that makes this weekend's Patriots/Bills game seem like the Super Bowl all combine to make what I consider a corrupt and boring sports league. And don't get me started on the "college" part of "college football", since the season here started 3 weeks before classes and most football-factory D-I players do the bare minimum academically to retain eligibility anyway, it seems more like a group of unpaid semiprofessionals than what I would call "students".

But being here in Buckeye country, you can see the positive as well. The city, young and old, unites behind a common sense of civic pride, even if the young are often too sloshed on game day to realize it. There is a definite sense of happiness in the air on days that OSU wins, even if they did only beat some patsy school that they paid to come in and get beaten so that the Buckeyes could warm up for conference play and boost their ranking in the process.

It's definitely an adjustment, but one I think I'll be able to make once the season ends and the student-athletes get back to their normal routine: working out and preparing for the NFL draft!

Bonus Random Opinion: I'm tired of hearing about the battle between social networking websites. Do people over the age of 16 really use MySpace or Facebook regularly? Why is it that I've worked in a tech-savvy industry for the past almost 3.5 years and know exactly zero people with their own page on a social networking site? And then there are the microblogs, which deserve their own full-length scathing post...