I am a marching band wonk. I conceded this long ago, and have written about marching bands several times. I played in a high school marching band, before I got to the varsity football team, and I was distinctive in that I like to believe I played the loudest clarinet in the history of American […]

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This may have occurred to every Trojan and Trojan wannabe in the country, and been written here, there and everywhere, but hey I’m in Paris, and I haven’t spent much time thinking about college football. But this one thought has crossed my mind, and it’s not a pretty one for the cardinal-and-gold folks. USC can’t […]

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Of all the American sports … the one that really doesn’t translate well outside the country … the one that suffers most, that I miss most in a sort of sneaky, “oh, yeah, I really like that and miss it” sort of way is … College football.

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I was mulling the whole idea of fandom, and team affinity, and how fairly random it is — most of it being based on geography or heredity. How we can love a guy when he wears our team’s uniform and hate him when he doesn’t, meaning we ultimately are rooting for or against, as Jerry […]

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Just because it is logistically possible to make a road trip … doesn’t mean you ought to. A couple of weeks ahead of that theoretically possible trip, I never remember that idea, above. A couple hours before I leave … then I remember, but the money has been spent and I’m committed and, well, here […]

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President Obama did an NCAA bracket for ESPN. A bad idea, really. No possible political gain can come from it. Because eventually he’s predicting 64 teams will lose, and there will be fans and players at all those schools who will wonder why the president didn’t have enough faith in them. I imagine this is […]

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The Bruins and Trojans are in, as we knew they would be. UCLA for its body of work and USC for winning the Pac-10 tournament title, which we didn’t quite see coming. Nice. For Los Angeles-area college basketball (which also has Cal State Northridge in the tourney). But don’t expect any L.A. team to last […]

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I was born a bit of a cynic. Even as a child it seems as if I thought it unhealthy to be too enamored of any sports team or individual athlete. But I made some exceptions. Particularly when it came to football. Brad Van Pelt was one of those guys. And now he’s dead at […]

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Guaranteed, this is not the first time someone has suggested that, if Karl Marx were alive today … he would be 190 years old, and doctors would be staring at him with mouths agape — like rubes at the carnival’s two-headed calf. As I was saying, if Karl Marx were alive today, he wouldn’t be […]

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My ear isn’t exactly close to the ground on this one. Not while living on Hong Kong Island where college football is well behind badminton on the list of popular sports. But I have the Internet, and I can read blogs and news stories, and from what I’m seeing, something odd is going on out […]

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