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.

Baseball suffers, of course. No one in Europe plays it. Hardly anyone in Asia plays it, aside from Japan and Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, South Korea. But baseball is so stat-driven, and so basic in how it is played, that simply reviewing boxscores, easily available on the internet, give you a fairly good sense of what is happening.

American football suffers, of course, because no one plays it at all, outside the U.S.,  unless you count the Canadian variant. But the NFL is such a big corporate concept that it manages to seep into all sorts of international news reporting. Call it The Brett Favre Syndrome. Some teams and some names are so huge, in the States, that they creep into English-language media overseas. Plus, at least one or two NFL games are available in many cable TV packages, overseas.

College football?

Nope.

So, I am fairly thoroughly unaware of what is about to go on,  in the 2009 college season.

Not for lack of trying. I’m reading the Los Angeles Times on the Web, trying to keep up with USC and UCLA. ESPN.com has lots of college football coverage, and I read a fair amount of it. I know, for example, that the Heisman race at the moment seems to be about Tim Tebow, Sam Bradford and Colt McCoy.

But … college football gets no visual exposure, here in Europe or over in Asia. And seeing the college game is pretty much essential to the experience. Being there is best, of course, but televised cheerleaders and bands and fans wearing college gear … and the concept of being able to see a dozen televised games a week, in the States, is a legitimate backup plan to sitting in the stands.

Over here, you are reduced to Webcasts, or chasing your team on some random site. It isn’t at all easy to follow the sport on a macro scale.

And remember, nobody cares about it, in the foreign country you happen to be in. Even the International Herald-Tribune, the American overseas paper, runs college football scorelists that contain only the top 25 — and the Ivy League schools and the service academies.

So, I missed nearly the entire 2008 season because I was working in Hong Kong from October through January.

Now, I’m in Paris for five weeks, and nearly every team in the nation will have played at least once before I get back.

Aaron Corp or Matt Barkley? Beats me. Is this the year the rest of the Pac-10 catches up to USC, and some of it passes? Could be. But I knew that before I left California. Will the national title game be about the Big 12 and the SEC? Probably. But I didn’t get it from Le Monde or L’Equipe.

I can, however, tell you about many of the latest goings on in the English Premier League or even France’s Ligue 1 or Italy’s Seria A. Or that England just won the Ashes back from Australia, in cricket. (Yes,  cricket.)

College football? Out of the loop, beyond the basics. And won’t be back in it till I get back to California. That’s just how it is.