The Third Season

Every August marks the beginning of a new season, a new crop of incoming freshmen, and new hopes for your football team that is starting off fresh. If you think about it, it's the first season of southern college football. We get to hear about how good Georgia is going to be; how if we can get by Florida, we can run the table to the SEC championship game. And, of course we anticipate the battles between traditional powerhouses like Alabama, Auburn, or LSU.

After the hangover of the bowl games, comes the second season. Although it was started early the previous year, and somewhat followed all throughout the first season, the recruiting season is getting to be as important to many computer potato as the first. The bragging rights that come with recruiting season almost rivals that of the regular season. How many more times do we have to hear how good Alabama will be because of their new recruting class. It's extremely inaccurate and all too many times 5 star players end up being kicked off the team or never are worth a crap altogether. {I'll refrain from naming a few Tennessee Vols that come to mind.} Thankfully, it pretty much ends in February and thus concludes the second season.

Now, there's a third season that brings out the red in many a southern football fan. It's sort of followed with a lazy eye as it's vacation seaon and the first season still seems too far away to really care a hell of alot. I'm talking about the "gotcha" season. It seems this is the period when boys will be boys, or sometimes boys will be criminals. That's right. It's time for fans to start needling their respective rivals about how many so and so's landed in the pokey in the offseason. A few years back, Tennessee was starting to get a bad rep about being "UThug". Of course, alot of this comes with being successful, but every rival is looking out for the police blotter in the opposing teams' local paper. We've seen Georgia kind of run through the blotter gauntlet this year, and I'm sure they're have been other UT fans other than me point this out to a diehard Dawg.

So, now that we know that southern football never stops, let's get this season behind us and kickoff the first.... which is alot more fun to watch on TV.