If you have a moment this morning, or tonight, before or after the game, you might enjoy this encomium for college football by Josh Levin. 

As the NFL gets increasingly self-important (”This is Football Night in America“) and self-serious (excessive celebration, 15 yards), college football is as important and serious as it’s always been. That is, very important and very serious [...]

Pro athletes want to win for themselves and for their teammates. The city they play in and the team they play for are less consequential-after all, you could be in Buffalo next year, or Cleveland, or Arizona. In college sports, the players and the fans have the same rooting interest: They both live and die for old State U. There will always be an impassable divide between the men on the field and those of us who wear their replica jerseys. But college football can, on certain Saturdays, feel less like a game than a communal experience. For those few hours, that impassable distance between the stands and the field collapses and, for a second, we’re all down there together.

For those of us from the SEC, from the Deep South (or the Rural Anywhere), in that Bermuda triangle that forms a vacuum of professional football, where college football is a cultural marker next to the Civil War and the Protestant Reformation, where pro football is more of a big-city business that’s only fun to watch after the Real Bowls are over, then Saturdays are important.  Not quite as important as Sundays, and not quite as timeless, but they mean an awful lot.