San Marcos — College football season for me usually starts with a phone call. This year it came on a sunny Sunday afternoon around the end of April.

“Whatcha think about Potts, that quarterback that’s going to take over for Harrell at Tech,” my ol’ Pops, a Red Raider fan from way back, asked without any sort of formal greeting. “He’s a big boy. But a lot of learning to do, huh?”

“It’s a Mike Leach offense. Same story, different arm. Just filling in the holes,” I said on the other line, admiring my freshly-mowed lawn and nursing a Shiner Bock.

“Yeah, well, we’ll just have wait and see,” he said, as he likes to say a lot.

And really, thats the key word here — wait. After a few more back-and-forths about the Big 12, wide-eyed season predictions and a few mutual Aggie jokes, we hung up. But there will be plenty more exchanges between now and September. Sitting and speculating.

And waiting for Sept. 5.

The anticipation to kickoff got a lot sweeter with the recent release of Dave Campbell’s Texas Football, a football junkie’s guide of Biblical proportions, offering up stats and predictions from the Six-man Woodson Cowboys to Jerry’s Dallas Cowboys.

Texas Longhorn fans will delight at first glance of this year’s cover, with the quarterback with the holy Texas handle front and center. Dave and the gang go on to pick the Longhorns to win the national title, and the Texas State Bobcats to win their second straight Southland Conference Championship.

Not bad for the IH-35 Corridor.

Personally, once I get one of these rags in my hands, I usually flip back immediately to the high school section, where individual districts and key players are analyzed, spitting out entirely too much high school football information than most of us should know — or even care about — in a lifetime.

But I need this information.

My beloved Texas Rangers, with all their youth and shockingly halfway-steady pitching, are already teetering in and out of first place. And as any Ranger fan can tell you, anytime the Arlington baseball team happens to find itself in first, you can shrug your shoulders and point to the calendar. It’s always before July 1.

Thus, baseball season usually fades quickly around here.

College football’s what I need now. It’s fight songs and regional pride. It’s the sweet smell of burning mesquite outside the stadium before a game. It’s burning the midnight oil over some obscure Pac-10 game. It’s fourth-and-one at the eight-yard line in Pasadena.

It’s almost here. The football semester has almost begun, and now thanks to Dave and the gang, I have my syllabus.

All that’s left now are several more phone calls to pops, filling phone lines with all kinds of BS. All that’s left now is the waiting.

Tom Petty wrote a song about something like that, and he’s right. It sure is hard.



Jeff Walker is the features editor at the San Marcos Daily Record. You can reach him at jwalker@sanmarcosrecord.com