NCAA, NFL, XFL, AFL, whatever. There are many reasons I dislike football season. In no particular order:
1. The University of Texas stadium is about halfway between my office and my house, and tailgaters start staking out parking spots the afternoon before the game. They transform my usually quick and joyous Friday evening commute into a long, snarly obstacle course as I try not to smash into drunk, clueless pedestrians and dually trucks towing brisket smokers as they fruitlessly try to parallel park along my route home.
2. I hate the color burnt orange, which, inconveniently, happens to be the UT school color. Not because I'm anti-school spirit; for me, that is soooo 1993. I just think it's drab and aesthetically offensive. That every third person I encounter from August to November is wearing it on their person makes my world that much darker.
3a. I hate the ubiquitous T-shirts proclaiming their allegiance to said color: I BLEED BURNT ORANGE. Do you, now? I bet we could verify that pretty easily if you'd just come a little closer....
3b. My roommate Wain works in a screenprinting shop and has to churn those T-shirts out by the truckload every fall. Sometimes this makes him tired and cranky, and we all die a little inside when Wain is sad.
4. It makes me sad that the UT library keeps cutting its budget and deferring the purchase of books while the football team gets more and more money poured back into its budget. I admit I don't totally understand the athletics funding system (mostly because I could care less, but I bet Roone will be happy to help us out here). And I know football is real popular in these parts. Still, I really think that a major university's ability to buy books should not be open to negotiation, especially when gleaming, gigantor sports facilities seem to appear overnight around campus each year.
5. I don't like that beer commercials get even more loud, insipid, and annoying during football season. The basic premise of almost every single one: Men like to drink beer and watch football, and women don't like for men to drink beer and watch football, haw haw haw, get it? Get it? Except it's not funny. It's not even true. These commercials make me sick and sad.
6. I don't like that when I'm sitting in a quiet bar by myself enjoying a rerun of The Simpsons, some asshole without fail aggressively asks the bartender to switch over to The Game. Hey, man, be all right if we put on The Game? How about putting on The Game, huh?
There is always, always, always a game on during football season, and no matter who's playing, for some reason it's always The Game. And the bartender almost always changes the channel, I guess to avoid the threat of unpleasantness that's implicit in the request. I've come to learn that the need to watch The Game is so important that everyone else's needs and desires are trumped without question. Unlike my desire to watch the tramampoline episode for the twentieth time, which apparently is a tiny little drib of sewage in the face of some asshole's need to watch The Game.
7. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I'm just tired of hearing about football. I don't even know that many football fans, and I'm tired of hearing about it. I'm also tired about writing it. I'm just tired.
I should mention that football season is not all pure annoying evil.
I love marching bands, which would not exist without football teams, although don't get me started on the auxiliary nature of bands and dance squads.
I love Super Bowl Sunday, when the city is quiet and, aside from bars, empty of all but a handful of non-football fans. Walking around downtown on Super Bowl Sunday is the closest you'll ever come to realizing your last-man-on-Earth fantasies, at least for now.
And actually, I like football itself. I don't mind watching it at all. I just hate all the ugly, annoying garbage and assholery that for some reason has to accompany it and get right in my way when all I want to do is go home.