I'm not entirely sure when I started to like football.
Growing up, I wasn't really that interested in the sport. I watched the Super Bowl when I was younger, but, like most, I was more interested in the commercials than anything else. When I got to high school and started to go to football games, decked out in red, blue, and white (those were our colors. Red, blue, and white. NOT red, white, and blue. Come on.), I was somewhat more interested, but I really just enjoyed being in the student section with the other Cougar Crazies.
And then I went to college.
At some point at UNC, I became a massive fan of football. On Saturdays, I went to Kenan Stadium to stand in the student section despite the heat, the cold, the rain, the wind, the glorious victory or the crushing defeat. I played on intramural flag football teams. I actually started to sort of care about who won the Super Bowl.
This was an unusual concept for me. I'd never been a big fan of watching sports on TV. Golf, baseball, hockey, even soccer. I don't know why-I just didn't really enjoy watching them on TV. But that all changed once I became a Tar Heel.
I went to many, many football games while I was in undergrad. I witnessed UNC being completely slaughtered by ECU, and completely slaughtering Elon. I worried about the transition from QB Bryn Renner to Marquise Williams and Mitch Trubisky. My blood pressure skyrocketed during many 4th quarter comebacks, including one in particular: I witnessed, live and in person, the absolutely GLORIOUS game-winning punt return against NC State by Gio Bernard (which I still like to occasionally relive).
I also grew to love watching the Heels on TV, preferably in a room with my friends while we chatted, pretended to do homework, ate, and got way too loud whenever anything went really right or really wrong for our team.
Though I am no longer going to the football games for my Tar Heels in person, I am still keeping up with them. I also have another team to watch: the Syracuse Orange.
Brief aside here: What's up with these two mascots? I love the Tar Heels, represented by Ramses the Ram,
"Our nickname, which also applies to North Carolina citizens, has at least two possible origins. One story hails back to the Revolutionary War and the troops of British General Cornwallis. After fording a river in eastern North Carolina, the British troops discovered their feet covered with tar, a product of North Carolina’s abundant pine trees and one of the state’s most important exports at the time. Some say the clever North Carolinians dumped it in the river to slow down the invading army. The British were said to have observed that if you waded in North Carolina rivers, you would get tar on your heels.
Another story comes from the Civil War. A group of North Carolina soldiers scolded their comrades for leaving the battlefield when things got tough. The soldiers threatened to stick tar on the heels of the retreating soldiers to help them stay in the battle. General Robert E. Lee is said to have commented “God bless the Tar Heel boys!” Whatever the reason for the moniker, our students and sports teams have long worn it with pride."
But I don't really know why the mascot is a ram instead of a foot or something. I think he was named after a football player nicknamed "the Ram" at some point, but whatever.
And then there are the Syracuse Orange.
And then there are the Syracuse Orange.
What?
Syracuse fans are, collectively, "The Orange." Not "oranges," but "Orangemen" and "Orangewomen." In emails from the school's chancellor, we are addressed as "Orange Friends." "Orange Nation." and this is the mascot, Otto, in a number of different representations (each more ridiculous than the last):
OK, so that last picture is not actually a real representation of Otto, but the first four are. In researching where this mascot came from, I found this explanation from Syracuse's school website:
Syracuse University's first colors, in 1872, were "pink and pea green," but then a year later became "rose pink and azure blue." SU's color finally was changed to orange in 1890. How Orange was adopted as the color of Syracuse University was described in June 1940 at the fiftieth reunion of the class of 1890. The chronicler was Frank J. Marion '90, the motion picture pioneer. Marion said his class was responsible for the change from the colors pink and blue. He recalled:
"At the end of our senior year Syracuse accepted the challenge of Hamilton College to a track meet and...a number of us went along to cheer our team. We wore high collars, right up to our chins -- cutaway coats, baggy trousers, and rolled-brim derby hats. On our canes we had ribbons of the college colors, pink and blue.
Much to our surprise, we won the meet, and on the train coming home from Utica we tried to "whoop it up." What kind of "whoopee" can be made with pink and blue, the pale kind you use on babies' what-do-you-call-thems? It just couldn't be done!
So on Monday morning a lot of us went to see the chancellor in his office and told him our tale of woe. Chancellor Sims was a kindly old gentleman, a real father to us all, and he was very sympathetic. He agreed that pink and blue were not very suitable colors.
SU Banner "Professor J. Scott Clark was named chairman of a committee to find new colors", Marion said. "I recall that we seniors had a sneaking idea that we might put over the class colors, orange and olive green." Professor Clark consulted Baird's manual, then the authority on college matters, to see what combinations of orange had already been taken. Orange and blue were the most popular, but orange alone apparently was not claimed by any school and was Syracuse's for the taking. It was adopted unanimously by the committee, the faculty, the Alumni Association, and finally the trustees."
I guess they couldn't come up with a cool mascot for an orange team like, I don't know, tigers or orangutans or clownfish or a turtle with its shell spray-painted orange or actual oranges or literally anything other than an anthropomorphization of the color orange.
Wait. Why am I talking about mascots again? Right. Football. OK.
I now have two college teams to follow closely: the Tar Heels and the Orange. I have two games to watch on Saturdays. (And the Orange are particularly interesting to watch because they've gone through two quarterbacks this season so far, one with a torn Achilles' tendon and one with an unspecified upper-body injury which resulted in the fifth-string QB playing and leading the team to victory in overtime.)
This past week, I watched the UNC-Delaware game (and the Heels had a PHENOMENAL game, by the way, ending in a definitive victory) and followed the Syracuse-LSU game on Twitter (which did not end quite as well, but was still fun to keep up with). A few weekends ago, while sick with a 24-hour stomach bug, I holed up on the floor of my bathroom with a blanket, pillow, stuffed dog named Doug, and my laptop to watch the Orange play (and beat!) Wake Forest University (it's interesting to note that I was almost a Demon Deacon:
He's pretty intimidating, I guess, right?
Maybe not.)
To bring this post to a close: I love watching college football. I can't pinpoint exactly when I started liking it so much, but I'm definitely a fan.
And don't even get me started on basketball.
End log.
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