THE FINAL 20 DAYS: 10

by WCT, The Ship of Fools

The longest off-season in sports is almost over and we are psyched. Today is August 18th, meaning there are now exactly 10 days until the beginning of College Football season.

To commemorate this, we are counting down the 20 (or so, looking like its going to be much fewer) things that make College Football so addictive that it gets us up out of our beds and into a bar at 12 noon on fall Saturdays. Today's edition: The stadiums

There is nothing on earth like a great college football stadium on a gameday. Nothing. Nothing in sports can match it. Period.

The stadiums themselves are cathedrals. A lot of the biggest and most famous college football venues are almost as old as the programs that they house. This creates an indelible link between the history and tradition of a program and the stadium in which home games are played. After the Rockne era, all of the historical events that have taken place at Notre Dame home games were in Notre Dame Stadium, built in 1930. All 7 of USC's Heisman winners, and all 7 of the school's national championship teams played at the LA Coliseum, which opened in 1923. Today, Nick Saban patrols the same sidelines the Paul "Bear" Bryant did at Bryant-Denny Stadium which opened in '29. It impossible to think of these programs without thinking also of the fields that hosted almost all of their significant moments. You see a similar link with great, old baseball stadiums, but those few, like Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium (which is closing after this year), are a dying breed.

Aside from being great historical venues, the atmosphere at a college football stadium is, in my opinion, unmatched in sports. 21 of the largest 23 American team sports stadiums in terms of seating capacity are college football stadiums, so if you are sitting in the stands, you could be seated with 80, 90, or in some cases, over 100,000 people. And most of the fans are standing throughout the game, and everyone is into every play. Its not like going to a pro game and sitting among luxury boxes and corporate seats. People don't go to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium to schmooze their clients. They go to watch the Gators. And lets face it, when you have a stadium full of thousands and thousands of drunk college students, its going to be a loud, fired-up crowd. Legend has it that LSU's Tiger Stadium once got so loud that a crowd reaction registered on a nearby seismograph as if it were an earthquake. (note: I believe it. I was there last year. That place is F-ing loud)

Basketball had the Forum, and Boston Garden, but those places have closed in favor of state-of-the-art buildings with full of luxury boxes. The NFL has Lambeau Field, and Arrowhead Stadium, but other that those two, there really isn't anything unique about the atmosphere in any of the stadiums that 90% of the League plays in. College football is the only sport where the stadium is a historical landmark, and the atmosphere inside is unique and intense.