College Football Tradeoffs

By Bryan Visser:

I have one simple rule when eating food, “weigh the trade-offs”. If you are going to eat something too fatty, spicy or gross that you will feel or be sick on the toilet afterwards, than adjust your eating habits accordingly. This rule is especially important around the Holiday Season. This year I attended two parties with large spreads of food. At the first party I appropriately weighed the trade-offs and ate more of a delicious crab salad and less of stuffed mushrooms. After this party I woke up feeling fine.

At the second party, I got cocky. I thought I was 17 again and decided to eat large portions of everything. The next morning I felt awful. I was tired and felt like making a bed on the floor of the bathroom. To make matters worse I opened the medicine cabinet and took what I thought was an antacid, but was really an allergy pill in a bottle with a similar label.  I did not weigh the trade offs of the food I ate that night and suffered heavy consequences for multiple days.

This same rule applies to the College Bowl season. I have deemed myself a “true” fan of sports and must live up to this self proclamation that means essentially nothing to anyone but me. In years past I have a made a concentrated effort to watch every bowl game possible because I wanted to be the king of sports talk around the water cooler. After a month of games, I couldn’t remember anything from any of the games, including the ones I actually wanted to watch. I wasn’t weighing the trade-offs. I had wasted my time and sucked all of the fun out of these great sporting events in the process.

This year was different. I looked closely at the schedule ahead of time, picked 3 games that really interested me and watched those games from start to finish.  In addition to these 3 games, I followed my Twitter time-line closely. If a game was trending and it was close towards the end I would turn it on.  It was perfect! I enjoyed the games; I knew the major stories from the other games that would fill the majority of Sportscenter and could still hold a competent sports conversation.

The best part of weighing the trade-offs of the Bowl Season is that I don’t have a college football hangover when the games are over. I don’t feel like I wasted my time and I while I largely hate the BCS, watching games this way keeps my anger from boiling over into obscure Facebook posts or Tweets or on the unsuspecting stranger that randomly asks for my opinion of a game.

For those of you that feel an obligation to watch every game…remember, your sports world won’t end if you don’t watch the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl. In fact, your sports world might just get a little better.