Spring is the best time of year for a sports fan. Spring is when you get to start over. Spring is when you get a chance at redemption. Last year’s failures, missed opportunities, and heartbreaks are all forgotten, lost to time.
For baseball fans, it’s a new found hope in Spring Training. NFL fans are looking for the missing piece in free agency and the draft. Basketball fans have, well, they have the opposite of hope, I guess, at this point your team is out of the playoffs or the Big Dance and the offseason is 6 months away with no hope in sight. OK, a pure basketball fan is probably not a big fan of spring.
But for a college football fan, there is Spring practice. It’s the one time you will purposely learn and quickly forget the team trainers name, so you can brag about how tough his offseason program is. It is your first chance to see that highly touted recruit. You will immerse yourself in the depth chart and hang on every word Coach utters during the after practice interviews. You will convince yourself and others that guys who didn’t play a down last year will be the next All Conference Player.
You become a glass half full kind of guy in the spring. It’s the only time of the college football year that you will not hate your coach for making that call. Or the quarterback for making that throw across his body. Or the defensive back for getting flagged for pass interference on third and forever. You are nothing but positive during spring practice.
You believe that greatness is in the air. You get excited for the depth of talent, because your coach won’t stop talking about how hard number four on the depth chart is working. You are all in on QB 1 this year. Though you can’t help but stoke a little QB controversy just to hedge your bet. You love everything about this year’s team.
And if that is not enough, Spring practice gives you a cherry to top it off with. The spring game! Enough of this one-on-one and skeleton drill crap, you want football. You want monster hits and fifty yard bombs. You want to see your offensive destroy your defense. You ignore the fact that the defense can’t hit the quarterback and praise his field vision. You want your running back to get hit so hard he has snot bubbles.
You want to go bowling this year and the Spring game gives you that hope.
Spring is college football nirvana, enjoy it while it lasts.