THE FINAL 20 DAYS: 6

by WCT, The Ship of Fools

The longest off-season in sports is almost over and we are psyched. Today is August 22nd, meaning there are now exactly 6 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 rivalries

College football rivalries set the standard by which all other sports rivalries are measured. College rivalry games are meaningful, intense, historic, and they only happen once a year. The Cubs and the Cardinals renew acquaintances 18 or 19 times a year, and the intensity is spread among those games. The Cowboys and the Redskins play twice each year. Auburn and Alabama only get one shot at each other each season, so they have only 60 minutes to get everything in.

College rivalries also are great because they inspire passion, among the players and among the fans. 365-day-a-year, season-defining passion. This passion begins as soon as one year's rivalry game ends, and does not stop until the following year's game kicks off. The old cliche is that you can go 1-11 as long as you beat your arch-rival, and its a successful season. And at a lot of places around the country, that is legitimately how people think. You really can't get this type of feeling in any other sport. ESPN drones on ad nauseum about the Duke-Carolina in basketball, or the Yankees and the Red Sox in MLB, but do you think Yankee fans would be happy if their team missed the playoffs, but won the season series from the Sox? Are they storming the floor in Chapel Hill if a .500 Tar Heal team beats Duke? Of course not. But last December, when a pathetic, 4 TD underdog Pittsburgh team beat arch-rival West Virginia, that team celebrated like it just won the BCS Championship. That one win made their season. I'm sure there are still Panther fans talking trash about that game to WVU fans. Imagine that, pounding your chest over a 5-7 team!

No other sports rivalries can even touch college football's rivalries. The Steelers and the Browns have nothing on OSU-Michigan. The Lakers and Celtics can't even compare to Army-Navy. College football rivalries are passed down from year-to-year and go to the very core of the people involved. A&M students hate how liberal Texas is, Texas students hate how conservative A&M is. Georgia Tech has an inferiority complex about how popular UGA is, UGA, well UGA doesn't really spend that much time thinking about G-Tech, because they are to focused on their rivalry with Florida. This isn't just competition between football teams, often times this is clashes between different classes of people that is manifested on the football field and in the stands. You just can't get that anywhere else. Bring it on!