Too early to get serious about football

Published 5:55 pm Sunday, July 9, 2017

By now, surely you’re aware of the brewing, uh, brouhaha over this LSU and Florida thing.

It has nothing to do with baseball’s recent College World Series, although some pundits are speculating that the timing is way too fishy to be purely coincidental to the Gators’ national championship victory over the Tigers.

It apparently kind of caught LSU off guard. It would appear that, at the least, proper diplomatic channels were not utilized before the Gators, perhaps seizing momentum from Omaha, dropped the big one.

This comes at a time when, even though sportsmanship sometimes reached kumbaya levels in Omaha, relations were already strained between the two football programs.

Now Florida has announced that it has chosen the LSU date on Oct. 7 as its homecoming game.

In today’s polite society, this could be construed as “disrespecting” the Tigers.

LSU fans (message boards, anyway) are in a pitter-patter over it.

Purple and Gold policy makers will surely be drafting a “frank” response with all due haste.

They no doubt will temper their “outrage” with a willingness to “compete” and “accept the challenge.”

An LSU isn’t used to being a homecoming opponent. 

In the SEC, that’s mostly for Vanderbilt. If you did nothing but ponder SEC schedule boards, you’d think the Vanderbilt mascot was (HC).

So is LSU justified in being offended?

As I recall, Florida is one of the few schools left where the homecoming tradition still means something besides allocating an extra five minutes for the halftime pageantry.

They still make a big deal about it in Gainesville.

Perhaps — but certainly not likely — the Tigers should feel honored to be chosen for such a hallowed occasion.

Not every school schedules a pansy with the hope that the (HC) court can lure in a quorum for an unwatchable game.

At any rate, analysts are keeping a close eye on the situation, expressing hopes that the situation does not escalate further.

The most logical answer to what it all means, how it got blown out of proportion, is this: It was July 6, a perfectly slow news day begging for some college football almost two full months in advance of any actual trench warfare. 

Other regions can do what they please. But in the South that is how homecoming suddenly becomes a big story or, if you prefer, in the vernacular, “goes viral.”

It also verily begs for the Southeastern Conference to go ahead and conduct SEC Football Media Days 2017.

Conveniently, and earlier than ever, the conference will oblige with its four-day celebration beginning Monday.

Other conferences do this kind of thing in one day with a cozy gathering of a few TV cameras.

The SEC has itself a summer football Woodstock, bursting an entire resort hotel to its seams with more than 1,000 media in what becomes a five- or six-ring circus of gleeful, unapologetic pigskin excess. Radio Row spills out into the adjoining mall.

It is also considered “breaking news” when the conference announces the three players from each school who will accompany their head coaches. The choices (I am not making this up) are analyzed and second-guessed. Their attire will be scrutinized as closely as at the NFL draft (by media types who wouldn’t know a cummerbund from a bungee cord).

But that’s July in the SEC.

Some consider it the official kickoff to the college football season. 

Others, far wiser, point out that you can’t even smell the first kickoff from here on the calendar.

But it’s quite a gala.

As I veteran I have learned you have to pace yourself and turn off your brain every time the words “returning starters” or “We feel good about …” are mentioned. Otherwise you’ll hit information overload before lunch of the second day. You’ll be a basket case long before Nick Saban wades through the crimson flash mob and arrives on Wednesday.

Someone will, but this is not the time to be asking about the progress in Tennessee’s offensive line.

Way too soon for that foolishness.

This is the time for a full-blown witch hunt into which coach’s vote kept Tim Tebow from being unanimous on the 2009 first-team All-SEC preseason (when it turned out to be former Gator coach Steve Spurrier — by accident, he said — an already great story suddenly had Pulitzer possibilities).

Or the year Texas A&M’s Johnny “Football” Manziel showed up fresh off being sent home early from the Manning Passing Academy, which surely make the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest, silliest media mosh pit of all time. Proud to say I was front and center.

It’s a perfect time for hot seat rankings, for serious discussions of proposed uniform changes, to heckle the Big Ten, even for a new Vanderbilt coach — I think his name was Robbie Caldwell — to announce that in his past life his first paying job was to artificially inseminate turkeys, and scattered the ballroom when he offered to demonstrate how it’s done.

That’s the kind of news we want at SEC Media Days.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I have a zinger I plan to fire at LSU Cajun coach Ed Orgeron on Monday. You’ll have to stay tuned.

But it’s also the perfect time to get to the bottom of this LSU-Florida thing.

Fortunately, this really will be the time and the place.

The ramifications will likely be felt for three or four days.