An introduction, an explanation, a road for the season ahead

Too much time and too many bits are wasted on explaining why a new blog on some topic on which there is already time and bits wasted seems like an idiotic start to this new writing venture of mine.

Suffice to say this: I have opinions. Strong ones. Right ones, and wrong ones. I also have changing opinions. And, most importantly, I sometimes need to reveal these opinions, let them be available for the masses, so that they may tear them apart, so that they may absorb them.

I think a great deal about the state of college athletics in the United States. And at no time do I consider its state more than during college football season. There is so much wrong with my all-time, anytime, everytime favorite sport. There remains much about it which is right, but so much that is not.

And so it is without further ado or delay that I unveil MountaineerDave: On College Athletics.

First, some notes:

Who am I?

I grew up in West Virginia rooting for the only team around, the Mountaineers. Coach Don Nehlen was getting started in Morgantown when I first started following the game. I remember my grandfather’s excitement over a game we heard bits of on the radio. When I think of it, there wasn’t a time during that era of his life that recall him being more excited than when we were working on building a house and West Virginia did the unthinkable by marching into a Norman, Oklahoma and whipped the Sooners. True, in retrospect, it wasn’t the best team that the University of Oklahoma ever put on the field, but it raised eyebrows everywhere, and put a couple names on the tongues of everyone who pays attention to college football: Jeff Hostetler, Don Nehlen. Things were never the same for WVU (except perhaps at the end of Coach Nehlen’s career). But, the Mountaineers could no longer be considered some nothing team from the Southern Conference (a I-AA division). They were there nationally, now.

And they had beaten the Sooners, who my grandfather knew best as having been the best team of the 1950s and 1960s. West Virginia was suddenly somebody.

I loved that a football team could make somebody who wasn’t happy with his situation in life feel better about everything, if for only a short time.

Better than that, the entire state felt it. Something was afoot.

And I was growing up there. So, there couldn’t possibly be another rooting interest in my mind.

Where am I?

I moved to Pittsburgh to attend college (but not at hated Pitt!), and have since moved to the greater Boston area. Interesting thing about living in towns with professional sports: college athletics take on a much reduced import than what I grew up experiencing. Where WVU had lifted the spirits of nearly every citizen of the state (even my grandmother, whose primary concerns were her family, her friends and her bible, in that order came to know what WVU was doing from her chair in front of the televisions), the fates of the University of Pittsburgh and Boston College are completely inconsequential to the citizenry of their respective cities.

Ultimately, I think there’s something healthy about that. But, damn, does it make for talking my favorite sport difficult.

What am I doing?

I am filling my college football hunger, rooting for my childhood team from afar, and on the cheap. No ESPN GamePlan subscribers here, thanks.

No, I’ll be filing my opinionated reports based on what I can glean from the nine thousand video-hosting websites, blogs, news reports, etc. My focus will be on my favorite team, but I intend to move forward with a wider eye. Hey, I love my Mountaineers, but not everyone who cares about college athletics is interested in WVU, and I’m going for more than a simple niche readership.

That said, I plan to follow something approximating the schedule below:

• Daily comments on whatever, and I mean whatever, is floating around the wires and webs on my favorite team.

• Weekly picks to go along with a topic of the week.

• Something that will be a feature whenever it comes up, which is too often (and was a favorite section of our weekly college newspaper, about three hundred years ago): the police blotters. I’ll be looking for reports of malfeasance every day, but how often I need to comment on it, well, we’ll just see.

Other stuff is likely to come along, but this is where we’ll start.

I should have posted this a week, or two weeks ago.

Alas, I suck.