A top-10 Florida State goes down to an upstart Georgia Tech on the very first game of the 2024-25 college football season.
Somebody said college football is back. And, how!
With apologies to Christmas, for me, this is the most wonderful time of the year, and I’m glad we’ve got meaningful college football to talk about once again.
The drama. The passion. The pageantry. The rankings. The fight songs. The emotion.
Even with all the Name, Image and Likeness stuff and all the complaints of justified millionaire college kids playing football, it’s still very much the game I love — the game that made me fall in love with all sports.
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College football always has a special home in my heart because it was the source of much bonding time with my father. I’ll forever cherish memories of me sitting on my dad’s knee while I yell at the TV screen at players whom I had absolutely no idea what they were doing.
Slowly but surely and year after year, my father taught me the game. Then I discovered that, as a Nebraska boy, I should root for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. My father was an Oklahoma Sooners fan, so of course that was a natural point of adversarial energy in our home. But I also know he used to get a kick out of my increasing knowledge and appreciation of the game, as I think I caught him rooting for some of those national championship Nebraska squads of the 1990s.
Living in Georgia and covering football in two states — Georgia and South Carolina — that have seen national championships come to its schools since the last time my beloved Huskers hoisted that hardware (1997), has definitely helped stoke my desire for the game, even in this new era.
Roles have reversed over the years as well. Now I’m the dad. My 13-year old son cut his teeth on this grand old game by falling in love with the Georgia Bulldogs who, today, are a lot like my Huskers were in terms of dominance. I’m not a Georgia fan by nature, but definitely by nurture, as I used the Bulldogs’ emergence as a formidable national power to help tutor my son in the way he should go as a college football fan.
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As I watched the conclusion of Georgia Tech-Florida State, I did so alone. My father is in heaven now, and my son is competing out of town. So it’s just me and the sounds and smells of my wife cooking dinner. But in some strange way, I still felt them with me as I shouted in approval of the Tech upset.
Covering high school football for the last 15 years has given me an even deeper appreciation of the college game because it’s afforded me numerous opportunities to write about high school athletes who make the jump to the next levels of the game.
Many of my opportunities to cover college ball — and in some cases, NFL football — have sprung from the work I’ve been privileged to do at the high school level. What a thrill it is to see kids you covered on Fridays doing it big on the Saturday big stages!
Additionally, the older I get, the more I realize that my affinity for college football also comes from the fact that college football season is the unofficial start of fall and the precursor to the holiday season, which I absolutely love.
I swear, I’ve felt a greater crisp in the air this past week leading up to “Week Zero” of the season. Then I look at my weather app and realize we’ve probably got at least a couple more weeks of temps in the summer-like 90s. But, heat aside, I can’t ignore how this time of year always makes me feel.
I’m never glad when it’s over. And the offseason always feels like an eternity. But Saturday we were rewarded for the wait as the Georgia Tech-Florida State game felt like a midseason conference matchup with playoff implications.
This year marks the fourth year without my father by my side watching my favorite game — even longer if you consider the last 10 years of his life were marred by that wicked Alzheimer’s Disease. But even when his memory was waning, I still felt like he knew what I was screaming and yelling about whenever I’d watch a game in his presence.
Because of his memory, because of my ever-maturing son who seems to enjoy the games the older he gets, and because of my own love for football, I promised myself that I’d immerse myself and enjoy the season even more than normal.
Beyond being a sports journalist. Beyond being a fan. Beyond being just a football guy, I’m going to enjoy it because it represents one of the few things in this crazy, convoluted life of ours that still seems somewhat pure.
Some may argue that, given what the game has evolved into. But I guess I’m just stubborn in that I choose to hold on to the foundational stuff that still makes me get butterflies every Saturday morning when I get set to find College Football Gameday on my television.
Some things never die. And no matter how much it all changes, I believe the uniqueness of college football is one of those things — at least in my life. Not because it, in itself is immortal, but because my desire to keep its embers burning in my sports heart is.
Gabriel Stovall is the sports editor for The Augusta Press. He can be reached at gabriel@theaugustapress.com.
