Even before the season began, I was expecting to attend the Sun Belt Championship Game at Appalachian State University. That was a bold prediction, considering that the Sun Belt Conference has a moveable championship game: it is hosted by the school with the better record. That’s one of the main reasons I wanted to attend a championship game from the Group of Five: I have been attending games at schools all season, and all of the Power Five conferences have stationary games that take place at NFL stadiums. Only the MAC in the Group of Five does this. And three of the Group of Five conferences are close enough to me that it would be possible to make a trip without too much effort. I wanted it to be App State, because they’re probably the closest ... read more

I'm going to break with tradition during this football season and write about a place where I didn't attend a game. I’ve written about Art Deco in the past, but this blog is exclusively about that architectural style. On a recent episode of The Man in the High Castle, one of the characters states the following nugget: “Architecture isn’t just about buildings.” This is probably one of the most important things to understand about architecture. It makes statements. It inspires. Art Deco, short for the French phrase arts decoratifs, was a movement in art and architecture from the 1920s through the 1940s. It was meant to be a break from what had gone on before. It was about efficiency, but also grandeur. It was about domination, but simplicity. The artists of the 1920s wanted modernity, and ... read more

It was my second time this season wearing purple and cheering for the Tigers in Death Valley. Except that it wasn't the same Tigers or the same Death Valley. Say what? Exactly. That's the weird world of college football. Many of my fellow UGA people will be appalled that I visited Clemson, wore Clemson colors, and had a good time. But I did, so they can get over it. For better or for worse, I didn’t realize until I was already in my car and leaving town that I hadn’t bothered to put out the word that I was heading to Clemson for the game. I had done that for other games that were nearby, especially when there were people I knew who might attend the game, too. It had really slipped my mind. Also, this ... read more

Since I’m doing more on this trip than just college football, I’m dividing it into two parts. The first will be all about the football gameday experience (and getting there). The second part will talk about all the stuff I did on my way back home, since I had a couple of days to be a tourist before I had to be back home. So let me say that Notre Dame has been a favorite of mine for as long as I’ve been following college football. I know people say they’re always overrated, and in the past few years in the world of UGA fanhood, it’s become the norm to trash-talk Notre Dame. We did beat them both times in the past three years, so the trash-talk is warranted, on some level. But when it comes ... read more

For the past decade or so, one phrase has become standard for teams on the rise that want to prove they're legit: We Want Bama. And the team from the University of Alabama has not only accepted their role as the dominant team in college football; they have unabashedly made it their brand. Before this season began, I knew I would need to make it over to Tuscaloosa at some point during the season. I had originally planned on visiting about a month ago, but the quality of the opponent in that game made me reconsider. The Bama-Tennessee rivalry, so much that it is, caught my attention. It is played every year, and always the third Saturday in October. And until this year, it has been the CBS game of the week—meaning it takes place at ... read more