Sometimes There Can Be Too Much of a Good Thing

I'm all for having ten channels running a seemingly endless stream of college football games on Saturdays in the fall. In fact, I was totally pissed when I realized that the Big Ten channel apparently wasn't a part of my Dish Network package anymore, meaning that I had one less option for gridiron-based entertainment on an autumn Saturday between noon and midnight. I was a bit annoyed last year when the regular midweek MAC game was discontinued. There was a point two years ago when you could catch at least one live college game every day of the week but Sunday and Monday. Sure, I got more sleep last year when I never had to worry about getting caught up in a fun game on a Tuesday, especially if the Falcons played on Monday Night Football the night before, but I still felt strangely empty for two days of the week last season. I think I'm starting to get off that pang of loss this year.

Obviously I'm not one to be disgusted by too much of a good thing. I just got through proofreading my wife's write-up about her interview of some second-graders in the gifted program and she comments how the one kid's obsessive interest in a specific subject (in his case WWE wrestling) is normal for a gifted child. Apparently I'm just smart.

And apparently really freaking smart because I also have obsessive interest in craft beer, cooking and food, current events, geography, and chickens. I'm like six times smarter than that stupid kid.

Despite my overly obsessive love of American football, even I hate one aspect of the kabillion-cable-channel age in in which we live. I absolutely despise the replayed games that you see on ESPN-U and CBS C (that was something like CSTV last year) all week long, including Saturday, the holy day of college football.

This wouldn't be so bad if those two channels were as responsible in their guide descriptions as ESPN Classic, which always posts the date of the replayed game at the very beginning. Nope, these games are replayed without a single reference to when they were played. Of course, with my obsessive attention to detail (at least to things that I'm actually interested in) I'm able to figure this out pretty quickly because I pretty much have any match-up worth showing on TV memorized for at least a week after it's in the schedule. The catch is that the guide only displays "College Football," which gets me excited. I click the info button only to find it was a game that was from the previous Saturday, leaving me feeling ripped off on a Wednesday night.

Besides, any good college football fan has already skimmed the scoreboard on ESPN.com or some other sports news source by that point and knows the score, or at least who won by Wednesday. Who in the hell is watching the replays of these games? Are there really people out there dorkier than I who are still interested in football? And why don't they have a DVR to record it the first time it came on TV? Dorks tend to make good money. Those people are total losers.