Football season: Already preparing myself

I love basketball.

Nothing gets my competitive juices boiling like a fullcourt game of basketball. I was raised playing basketball in the driveway, throwing the baseball in the back yard, and tossing the pigskin outside. But nothing has ever been able to match basketball from the standpoint of actually participating in battle.

However, there's one thing basketball can't top.

There is nothing quite like football season.

Basketball has always been my favorite sport to play, and its intrinsically surreal display of human physiological art in motion is the single-greatest accomplishment of mankind in organized athletic competition.

But the violence, provincialism, and pride of football is unmatched.

We Texas sports writers received Dave Campbell's Texas Football magazine Tuesday, three days before its release to the general public. Since we participate in the Writers' Poll featured in the publication, we get the perk of seeing it early, as long as we hold any stories until its actual release date.

For me, growing up in the ArkLaTex, particularly East Texas, the release of DCTFM each June was like having an extra Christmas. I went into football depression when the college football national championship was played in early January, trying to get my gridiron fix from the NFL playoffs but always looking forward to the next season's high school and college story lines.

I knew the magazine would be coming in June, and always anticipated buying it. My dad and I would search for it once the calendar hit the second week of June, scouring Wal-Mart stores and bookstores everywhere we went.

For me, having my own opinions on football in the state of Texas published in DCTFM is a small dream come true. As insignificant as it may seem to outsiders - or even me now that I'm a bit desensitized to it - I still have to sit and think for a minute that at 23 years old last year I first had my opinions published in DCTFM. And for the second straight year, I had my preseason picks and other prognostications included in the Writers' Poll.

But what the release of DCTFM really represents is the early, unofficial start to football season. The next two months will be spent studying DCTFM and various national publications such as Athlon, Street and Smith, and others to give ourselves an idea on what to expect - and what to argue - concerning the 2008 football season.

I'm already ready for this season. The 2007 college football season was insanity. LSU's unlikely, two-loss championship year was the perfect ending to an over-the-top season. The SEC looks to be even stronger in '08, if you can imagine that, and nothing is better than getting a group of friends together on a Saturday night in October to watch Southern titans such as LSU and Auburn or Tennessee and Alabama bludgeon each other for three hours for the sake of their hometowns, cities, campuses, counties, states, and regions. Bragging rights are on the line. Southern ladies are dressed like princesses. Livelihoods and happiness hang in the balance. Calling the atmosphere electric simply doesn't fully grasp the intensity of the near-supernatural spectacle.

I'm ready for football season. I hope you are, too.